The Department of Health today said it had received a report yesterday evening from COVID-19 testing service provider BGI about the sending of a negative test result by SMS to 216 people who were tested back in March.

These individuals had already got their negative results earlier. No positive cases were involved, the department stressed.

The department understood that BGI staff had wrongly uploaded old negative results to the department’s information system on November 28, leading to the automatic SMS dissemination on the same day under the existing setting. The messages carried the recipients’ own test results on March 20 and the specimen bottle numbers.

Following the department’s advice, BGI has informed the people affected about the incident and apologised via SMS.

The wrongly uploaded information has been handled and testing data in its information system has not been affected, the department emphasised. In addition, the incident did not involve any laboratory service and was not related to testing accuracy or validity.

The Government has instructed BGI to follow up on the incident, particularly in reviewing the current workflow of data entry and result uploading, in order to ensure that improvement measures are duly implemented with a view to preventing similar incidents from occurring again.