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LONDON, Nov 29 (Reuters) – England’s government agency responsible for responding to public health emergencies said errors in a testing laboratory may have led to thousands of positive COVID-19 cases being falsely reported as negative and may have caused as many as 20 deaths. .
Britain has the highest coronavirus death toll 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’s Health Security Agency (UKHSA) found that the Imansa laboratory in central England falsely reported nearly 39,000 tests as negative between September 2 and October 12 last year when they should have been positive.
The cause of the errors was a misalignment of the threshold level for reporting positive and negative results of PCR samples for COVID-19, the UKHSA said in a report after completing the investigation.
As a result, many people would have continued with their daily lives and would not have self-isolated even though they had Covid.
The UKHS said the errors could lead to up to 55,000 additional infections in areas where false negatives were reported.
Immensa Health Clinic, the private company that runs the lab, was founded in May 2020 and has been awarded contracts worth 170 million pounds ($203.63 million) to process the results of PCR tests.
Immensa’s owners, Dante Labs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
UKHSA director and lead investigator Richard Glave said: “Through this investigation we have looked carefully at the arrangements for contract monitoring of private labs providing additional tests during this time.”
“There was no single action NHS Test and Trace could have taken individually to prevent this error occurring in a private laboratory. However, our report provides clear recommendations to reduce the risk of this type of incident happening again.”
($1 = 0.8349 pounds)
Reported by Andrew MacAskill; Editing by Alastair Smout and Arun Coyure
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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