EXCLUSIVE: State health commissioner looking into new questions about coronavirus case numbers

ATLANTA — The person directing Georgia’s medical response to coronavirus sat down with Channel 2 Action News on Wednesday and answered questions ranging from, “How is the state doing right now?” to “Why have there been issues with data presentation?”

Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey has become a familiar face in Georgia’s fight to contain the spread of coronavirus. She has been by Gov. Brian Kemp’s side since the beginning of the pandemic, advising how to fight it.

“Does it appear the social distancing, the things that we are doing as a state have been working, or is it still a little early to tell?” Channel 2’s Richard Elliot asked Toomey in a one-on-one interview Wednesday.

“It looks pretty good to me. I look at it, it’s plateaued a little, a little bit going down, so we’re seeing a decline,” Toomey said.

It’s those numbers, and that plateau, that Kemp said led him to decide to reopen much of the state. It was a move that’s drawn both praise and criticism.

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The data and its release has been criticized by some who said one graph was misleading and showed improvement where there wasn’t any.

Now, a new investigation from Channel 2 Action News has shown that Georgia is mixing its antibody and regular test results together, which inflates the state’s overall testing numbers and deflates the percentage of people testing positive.

Toomey said she’s just been made aware of that and is looking into it herself.

“I don’t want you to think that I’m hiding anything. I actually am still learning about this literally over the last few hours. So, I’m trying to understand, you know, where we are on this,” Toomey said.

As far as that graph, Toomey said they’re always trying to make the website data easy to understand while also being accurate.

It can be a tough balance, but she said they remain dedicated to transparency.

“We are continuing to work aggressively in partnership with the governor’s office to ensure our website is as accurate and updated as possible,” Toomey said.

Toomey told Elliot that she’s proud of how the state is now working on contact tracing so they can track where a patient has been and can isolate those they’ve been in contact with.

She also points to how aggressively the state has been monitoring and tracking hotspots -- like the one that popped up in Hall County’s Hispanic-Latino community.

Channel 2 Action News was there last Friday as Kemp toured a pop-up testing facility in Gainesville as well as a poultry plant to see how it was dealing with COVID-19 and its employees.

Toomey said preventing that hotspot becoming a full-blown outbreak, similar to what we saw in Albany, was a big achievement.

New questions arise about Georgia COVID-19 testing numbers and the real infection rate The Georgia Department of Health is looking into its testing data again now that there are new questions about data that may have been mixed.

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