At least thirty people who came to be tested on December 27 at the laboratory in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, received an erroneous result. People positive for Covid-19 were declared negative, and vice versa.
It would be, according to the establishment concerned, “a human error in the encoding”. The problem was detected thanks to two patients who, surprised and skeptical about their negative result, warned the laboratory.
The latter explained to Sudinfo: “Our quality unit immediately spotted the error. Rather than re-inverting the results, we reanalyzed the samples to be sure, and we alerted the patients for which the results changed. The officials of the establishment assure that the problem would have been identified, even without the intervention of these two patients, “thanks to a double encoding system”.
Insisting on the fact that “this is the first time that such an error has occurred, out of a total of 300,000 tests carried out in 2021”, the laboratory apologized to those concerned, “no more than 46” according to the structure.
This confusion may have had consequences on the daily life of these patients, especially during this holiday season, the establishment said it was ready to make a gesture for the injured people. It is particularly a question of compensating those who would have been forced to deprogram a trip “for a false positive test”.
