Assistant health secretary Dr. Alex Billioux debunks a theory that Louisiana’s COVID-19 case count has been inflated by individuals being retested only to find out they are still positive for coronavirus. Billioux made it clear the state is not listing every positive test result as a new case.
“If you are a case on our board, that means that you’ve tested at least once as a positive. If you are tested twelve more times, we don’t add you twelve more times, you are just still that one case,” said Billioux.
The Red River Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness recently added to the theory with a Facebook post that questioned the validity of the parish’s case count as reported by LDH. Billioux says they’ve looked into the claim.
“When we looked at Red River Parishes numbers at the time of their posting, they did have 96 cases and we were not able to corroborate what they feel is something as low as 56 cases,” said Billioux.
Billioux says the health officials have nothing to gain from inflated numbers, adding that the spreading of misinformation about testing through hearsay can be dangerous.
“I think what we’ve seen in the last week is across social media campaign to try to erode public trust in testing in general,” said Billioux.