Data Safety Assurance

Immensa False Negative Covid-19 Tests
Domain: Medical
Year: 2021
Data Categories: Dynamic
Properties Lost: Integrity, Accuracy, Traceability, Verifiability

Summary:

43,000 people with Covid-19 mistakenly given negative PCR results

Details:

Failings at the Immensa lab in Wolverhampton led to an estimated 43,000 people with Covid-19 being mistakenly given negative PCR results; they thought they were in the clear, but were actually positive for Covid-19. This contributed to soaring rates of infection across the South West and Wales.

It took the Government almost a month to identify the issue and to stop sending PCR tests there.

It is unknown how much the virus spread in that time, but the effects of this mismanagement are potentially huge. Professor Deepti Gurdasani, a senior lecturer in epidemiology at Queen Mary University, estimates that the false negatives may have caused up to 200,000 further Covid-19 infections, and more than 1,000 avoidable deaths.

On Monday, November 1st 2021 the Good Law Project launched legal proceedings against the Secretary of State Sajid Javid over the Immensa testing scandal, citing the lack of a proper system to monitor the accuracy of tests at such labs breached the Department of Health and Social Care’s duty to protect life, and the human rights of those affected.

Data properties involved: Integrity, Accuracy and possibly Traceability and Verifiability.

Links:

• BBC programme Inside Science containing discussion with Professor Gurdasani: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0010q9x
  (accessed 09/01/2022)
• https://goodlawproject.org/news/immensa-update/
  (accessed 09/01/2022)
• https://www.gov.uk/government/news/testing-at-private-lab-suspended-following-nhs-test-and-trace-investigation
  (accessed 09/01/2022)
• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/21/immensa-lab-month-delay-before-incorrect-covid-tests-stopped
  (accessed 09/01/2022)