By Andrew MacAskill
LONDON (Reuters) – England’s government agency responsible for responding to public health emergencies said errors at a testing laboratory led to tens of thousands of positive COVID-19 cases being wrongly reported as negative and could have led to the death of about 20 people.
Britain has one of the highest coronavirus death tolls in the world, with more than 177,000 deaths since the pandemic began in 2020.
Many experts have said the contact tracing program fell far short of the “world-beating” system the government had promised.
An investigation by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) found that the Immensa laboratory in central England had wrongly reported around 39,000 tests as negative when they should have been positive between September 2 and October 12. last year.
The cause of the errors was the incorrect setting of threshold levels for reporting positive and negative PCR sample results for COVID-19, UKHSA said in a report after completing an investigation.
As a result, many people would have continued with their daily lives and not isolated themselves despite having COVID.
The UKHSA said the errors could have led to up to 55,000 additional infections in areas where false negatives were reported.
Immensa Health Clinic, the private company that runs the laboratory, was founded in May 2020 and has been awarded contracts worth £170 million ($203.63 million) to process PCR test results.
Dante Labs, the owners of Immensa, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Through this investigation we have carefully analyzed the arrangements in place to oversee the contracts of private laboratories carrying out surge testing during this time,” said Richard Gleave, UKHSA director and lead investigator.
“There was no action that NHS Test and Trace could have taken differently to prevent this error arising at the private laboratory. However, our report sets out clear recommendations to reduce the risk of incidents like this occurring again.”
($1 = 0.8349 pounds)
(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill; Editing by Alistair Smout and Arun Koyyur)
