Recordkeeping errors may be to blame for the Roanoke City Health District’s low COVID-19 testing numbers.
Roanoke has conducted the fewest tests of any district in the state, according to the Virginia Department of Health’s dashboard.
But Doctor Molly O’Dell, the district's director of communicable disease control, says Roanoke’s number of 883 tests is not accurate. "A chronic problem with the laboratories is not putting zip codes," O'Dell told reporters Tuesday. "And when we don’t have a zip code we don’t know what locality to assign a positive case to." Health officials then have to track the information back to the health provider or even the patient.
The health department dashboard has nearly 35,000 unassigned tests which are now being traced and corrected.
O’Dell said Tuesday she’s been told this issue caused thousands of Roanoke tests to go unassigned. She expects the corrected data to show up soon.
