Two branches of state government have embarked on separate studies to determine how common coronavirus is across the state’s population — each partnering with different universities.

The existence of two initiatives stems in part from a disagreement between Gov. Roy Cooper and Senate leader Phil Berger, who’s been advocating for the “random sample testing” for a month.

Berger argues that current COVID-19 testing practices exclude people who have minor or no symptoms, making it impossible to get a complete picture of how many people have the virus. Cooper’s Department of Health and Human Services initially worried that testing supplies were inadequate for such a study, but on April 17 it announced its own effort to conduct random testing — with a different methodology.

Berger’s spokesman said the Republican Senate leader spoke with Cooper and DHHS Secretary Mandy Cohen on March 27, encouraging them to launch random testing “because only that data could reveal the true hospitalization and fatality rates.”

On the same day, Berger wrote to Dr. Wesley Burks, CEO of UNC Health Care, with a similar request for the university.

“The needed data is readily accessible,” he argued. “It can be collected in a matter of days. I renew to you, in the strongest manner possible, the urgent need for prompt random sample testing.”

DHHS spokeswoman Kelly Haight Conner said that at the time of Berger’s request, “hospital leaders felt there were not enough testing supplies or PPE at that time. As testing capacity has grown, the state has worked to be able to study asymptomatic spread and announced last week’s partnership between Duke, ECU and UNC.”

That announcement, a collaboration between the three universities and DHHS, came four days after Berger announced that legislative leaders were chipping in $100,000 for a study led by Wake Forest Baptist Health and Atrium Health.

The two studies have similar goals but will use different methodologies. The Wake Forest study involves sending test kits for 1,000 participants, who will prick their fingers for blood samples that will be tested for COVID-19 antibodies, which would indicate if they’ve already had the virus. Participants will take the test every month for a year “to track the virus and population immunity over time,” Berger’s office said.

The UNC/Duke/ECU study will look at a sample of the population in Chatham, Pitt and Cabarrus counties. For the Pitt County study, ECU is partnering with the county health department to survey participants and have them submit a nasal swab sample for COVID-19 testing.

According to an ECU spokesman, the survey — to be conducted every two weeks for several months — will “ask participants about a wide variety of topics, ranging from their social distancing behaviors and illnesses in their family to the economic and mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Pitt County is included “because of health inequities in the region compared to other parts of the state,” according to Suzanne Lea, ECU associate professor of epidemiology.

Spokespersons for UNC and Duke, in response to an NC Insider inquiry, said they were unable to reach researchers to obtain more details on the studies there.

Asked why DHHS didn’t partner with Wake Forest on its study, Conner said Berger never asked DHHS to join the initiative before announcing the legislative funding. But she said that “North Carolina needs more testing of all types.”

But Berger spokesman Pat Ryan questioned why North Carolina didn’t initiate random sampling earlier, when Stanford University was launching similar efforts in California.

“We refuse to accept that California is somehow more capable than North Carolina, or that California’s universities are more capable than North Carolina’s,” Ryan said. “If the Cooper administration had accepted our request to prioritize that type of testing, we would likely have more actionable data available to us now (and better data to inform modeling) as decisions are made about reopening parts of the economy.”

This story was originally published April 26, 2020 at 9:52 AM.