The Georgia Department of Public Health is working to reconcile an apparent discrepancy in reports of the number of people who have died of COVID-19 in Clarke County, a DPH official told the Athens-Clarke Mayor and Commission Tuesday.

The DPH will also begin reporting COVID-19 deaths by nursing home facilities in Georgia, said Dr. Stephen Goggans, District Health Director of the Augusta-based East Central Public Health District.

An Athens nursing home, PruittHealth Grandview, confirmed last week that 10 residents of the home off Chase Street died after testing positive for coronavirus.

As of Tuesday evening, the DPH daily COVID-19 update website listed a total of 12 COVID-19 deaths in Clarke County.

Athens-Clarke Commissioner Russell Edwards said that he heard the 10 deaths had not been recorded as COVID-19 deaths in the state's tally.

"A seven-day delay for 10 fatalities — we can do better," Edwards said.

"We are already working on this," said Goggans in a commission meeting conducted via video conference Tuesday.

"This situation is eroding credibility all around," said District 6 Commissioner Jerry NeSmith.

A possible or partial explanation could be a delay while families are notified, the responsibility of the nursing home, said Goggans.

But public health officials are now seeing that nursing home residents with COVID-19 are showing symptoms which have not been previously associated with COVID-19, including gastrointestinal distress such as nausea and vomiting. That raises the possibility that some deaths that should be attributed to COVID-19 have been attributed to other causes.

The DPH's data collection has had important gaps, such as not collecting data on race, Goggans conceded as commissioners questioned him about the state's low rate of testing and other issues around the state's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But data collection is getting better, he said.

Better data collection and tracking early on would have helped slow down the disease's spread in Georgia, but now that community transmission is so widespread that getting people to observe social distancing is more urgent than tracking data, he said.

It's essential to get widespread testing, and the state has begun to expand the pool of people who can get tested,

Several factors combined to delay the availability of testing, including the faulty design of test kits created by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a worldwide surge in demand for coronavirus tests, he said.

Goggans also told commissioners that the Department of Public Health would provide testing kits to Clarke County Coroner Sonny Wilson, who has been unable to conduct tests on people who died unattended and may have died of COVID-19.

"There is some indication for post-mortem tests in some situations," he said.