Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox shared a troubling statistic on Twitter Friday evening -- although more than 1,000 samples have been taken in Tuscaloosa County from patients who fear they have COVID-19 coronavirus, more than half of those samples were insufficient or spoiled and will not return a conclusive result.

In a Tweet, Maddox said just 40 of the 1,043 samples collected at the DCH System testing site have been processed by the Alabama Department of Public Health. 475 samples are still in progress, and 528 have been turned out because the sputum samples within were too small or were spoiled in transit to Montgomery.

These figures basically guarantee that the four confirmed cases in Tuscaloosa County so far don't begin to tell the whole story.

"Although everyone is pouring their hearts and souls into this, it's disappointing," Maddox said. "We must all learn quickly and we must all do better for Tuscaloosa and our state."