Health officials in Connecticut said that upwards of 100 people, many from nursing homes in the state, were given false-positive results for COVID-19 after a “flaw” was discovered in the testing systems used by the state lab.
Of the 144 people who were tested between Monday, June 15, and Friday, July 17, 90 received false positives, the state’s Department of Health announced this week.
Under federal and state health guidelines, nursing home residents who test positive for COVID-19 are moved into separate living areas to quarantine them from healthy residents, which put those receiving false-positive results in danger of actually catching the virus.
“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions about numbers, because that would not be appropriate,” Acting Health Commissioner Deidre Gifford said on Monday, July 20.
“But we are talking to partner labs in the state of Connecticut. We want to understand the potential here,” she added. “We also want to want to know if they had made similar discoveries and maybe had taken similar actions.”
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