Health officials in Texas, Georgia, Vermont and Virginia acknowledged this week that they have been combining viral and antibody test results.

"If you put the two tests together, you fool yourself into thinking you've done more testing than you have," said CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

But if viral test numbers include antibody test results, experts say, it might give a state an inflated sense of its ability to test and track current infections.

Georgia's state health department, however, said the state was simply adhering to methodology guidelines from the CDC.

In a statement to Salon, a Georgia Department of Public Health (GDPH) spokeswoman doubled down on the claim that the department had followed CDC directives, but promised "greater transparency." The statement also mentioned, in its final sentence, that Georgia officials have decided to change their methodology, and will now separately report antibody and viral (PCR) results:.

When Salon reached out to CDC in search of further clarification on methodology, a spokesperson said that the agency publishes aggregated state data, which we now know included both types of tests, at least in some instances.

"CDC has worked quickly to publicly report COVID-19 laboratory data that we receive in electronic form from state and jurisdictional health departments as part of the pandemic response.

"Initially, when CDC launched its website and its laboratory test reporting, viral testing (tests for current infection) were far more commonly used nationwide than serology testing (tests for past infection).

Now that serology testing is more widely available, CDC is working to differentiate those tests from the viral tests and will report this information, differentiated by test type, publicly on our COVID Data Tracker website in the coming weeks," the spokesperson said.

"The advantage to the COVIDView lab data is being able to see the change in percent positivity over time, which has been going down for a few weeks," the spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Health confirmed that it too will now split test data according to type, but said the differences were "minimal" and did not misrepresent the bigger picture.

When these tests are removed from total results, there is minimal change in the percent positive of tests and no difference in overall trends," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson provided tables that illustrate heartening trends for the state — the percentage of positive results has declined — but also reveal how the many factors outlined above, such as the three-day lag for full results, might complicate a layperson's understanding of the data.

According to the latest state health department data, Georgia has reported more than 40,400 cases and more than 1,700 deaths. Texas has reported more than 51,300 cases and more than 1,400 deaths, Virginia has reported more than 44,100 cases and 1,099 deaths, and Vermont has reported more than 900 cases and 54 deaths.