LONDON (UK) – A technical failure in England’s COVID-19 testing data system has now been rectified and will not be found again, Work and Pensions Secretary Thérèse Coffey said on Monday.
Britain reported a record daily COVID-19 cases to 22,961 on Sunday, after it was found by authorities that because of a technical issue, over 15,000 test results had not been transferred into computer systems on time, including for contact tracers.
Coffey told Sky News, “The glitch has been found and fixed and I’m sure that the changes are brought in straight away to make sure this sort of problem doesn’t happen again.”
She said, “I’m sure that PHE (Public Health England) will not be allowing that issue to happen again.”
The glitch diverted attention to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Johnson admitted that there have been missteps but it was the the biggest health crisis the government has faced since the 1918 influenza outbreak.
The technical problem, which was identified on Friday and has now been resolved. The issue had led to 15,841 cases not getting uploaded into reporting dashboards employed by the National Health Service (NHS) contact-tracing system.
PHE’s interim chief executive, Michael Brodie, said, “We fully understand the concern this may cause and further robust measures have been put in place as a result.”
The authority said that all the people concerned got their results in a timely fashion, and the people found positive had been told to self-isolate.