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Over 50,000 people have been in contact with coronavirus-positive people who went uncounted by a COVID-19 test error that caused almost 16,000 coronavirus cases in England to be left unreported, according to The Guardian.
The error has been attributed to a Microsoft Excel blunder that kept 15,841 positive test results out of the official figures in England from 25 September to 2 October. Public Health England (PHE) has accepted blame for the COVID-19 test error.
The poor use of Microsoft Excel by PHE caused the COVID-19 test error, according to the BBC. The strategy PHE used to unify data logs made by third-party firms when examining patient swab tests led to the error.
The lists were organised into CSV files without any problems, but then PHE arranged an automatic strategy to unify data together into Excel templates so it could be easily uploaded and readily available to National Health Service (NHS) Test and Trace.
According to The Guardian, it’s believed most of the nearly 16,000 uncounted patients were non-complex cases, meaning they were tested in community settings and not hospitals or other health institutions.
Each non-complex patient claimed to be in contact with about three people, equalling about 47,000 people.
But a small group of the 15,481 uncounted coronavirus patients were considered complex cases. These people were tested in hospitals, health institutions, prisons or shelters and were in contact with at least seven people.
This brings the number of unsuspecting close contacts to over 50,000.
Health officials have been attempting to notify the close contacts of the coronavirus-positive patients who could have been spreading the virus for days, unbeknownst to them, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.
“What happened here was that some of the data got truncated and it was lost,” Johnson said, according to The Guardian. “But what they have done now is not only contacted all the people who were identified as having the disease — that was done in the first place — but they are now working through all the contacts as well.”
Health Secretary Matt Hancock is believed to have scheduled an emergency call with nine regional mayors in England about the COVID-19 test error. It is expected that Hancock will let it be known that PHE has taken blame over the COVID-19 test error.
“It’s an IT issue involving data being transferred from one system onto another one,” a PHE official told The Guardian. “It’s entirely PHE’s fault. It’s our bit of the process.”
The official continued: “It was down to a combination of human error and IT, that is a human using IT. It’s fundamentally an IT error but there is a bit of human error involved in this too.”
Hancock told MPs the COVID-19 test error has not been resolved yet.
Only 51% of the coronavirus-positive patients that were unrecorded by the Excel mistake have been contacted by the NHS Test and Trace team, according to the BBC.
The NHS Test and Trace system has done its best to track and notify people who have come into contact with an infected person, but with thousands not being counted because of the COVID-19 test error, it has been more difficult to trace them.
The Test and Trace system has had its own fair share of problems, though. While a million people downloaded the contact tracing app after its second trial, many had issues with it.
Hancock said the COVID-19 test error has “not substantially changed” the government’s evaluation of the pandemic, nor had the thousands of missed cases changed how local decisions were made to keep people safe.
“This incident should never have happened,” Hancock said, according to the BBC. “But the team have acted swiftly to minimise its impact.”
How do you feel about the COVID-19 test error debacle? Do you think the government’s handling of the pandemic has been sufficient? Tell us in the comments section below.
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