Human error was the cause of a mix-up at the Provincial Public Health laboratory resulting in a previously reported positive case actually being negative.
An extensive investigation led to the discovery of the error as well as two new positive cases.
The President and CEO of Eastern Health, David Diamond, says this is the first time an error like this has occurred. He says it’s an issue in the process of reporting, not in the quality of COVID-19 tests.
They are confident that these are the only cases involved and will be going back and looking at previous data to ensure that no other cases have gone undetected.
Dr. George Zahariadis, Director of the Provincial Public Health Laboratory, says more manual steps are being added to ensure this error does not happen again.
He says the error occurred when a file from one day was merged with a file from another day. He says the testing was perfect, it was the analysis of the merged file where the mix-up occurred.
Diamond says if more cases had slipped through, Public Health would expect to see more of the disease in the population.
He says the province’s COVID-19 software is used throughout the country and the software is being upgraded constantly. Diamond says they hope to soon find a technical solution to fix the problem so that human error would not be possible.
Newfoundland and Labrador now has seven active cases of COVID-19, and there is no longer an active case whose source is unknown.