The Ector County Health Department launched a new web site yesterday, showcasing how many people are being tested for coronavirus and whether they’re positive or negative for the virus.

So far, 59 people have been tested – but only 18 results have been sent back – luckily all negative.

But, the health department says it has no idea how many other tests local private labs have done – because they turn their results in straight to the state.

The test numbers for Ector County are surprisingly low – compared to Midland where MMH alone has tested 245 people.

Abilene’s tested 184 – San Angelo, 251.

We wanted to find out today why Ector County isn’t testing more people.

We know a lot of our viewers have the same questions we do – so CBS7's Shane Battis started with Mayor David Turner, who was the front man at the very first city / county news conference two weeks ago today.

He told us after that meeting to call him if we had any questions or concerns – but today he told Shane he didn’t know much about the numbers – and we would need to talk to the health department.

So we did.

But Director Brandy Garcia told Shane we’d have to get permission from Judge Debi Hays first before she could talk.

We had to work through a public information officer to talk with the judge. And after a couple of back and forth emails, the judge said she wasn’t ready to talk about numbers today – but could tomorrow.

We did get to talk with a county emergency operations chief this morning – who shed some light on why those private test numbers are a mystery.

Danny Chavez said, “What’s happening is they are reporting them to the state level. What’s happening is our local department is getting bypassed with that data. So now our plan is to figure out how to extract that data from the state level so we can get more accurate numbers.”

We plan on holding Judge Hays to that interview she said she’d do tomorrow.

Check in tomorrow evening on CBS7 News at 6 to see what she has to say.