DOVER, Del. (AP) - Twelve Delaware residents who tested positive for COVID-19 were incorrectly told they had tested negative, state public health officials acknowledged Friday.
Officials confirmed the incorrect reports after a Bridgeville man was hospitalized with the virus Thursday after being told he had tested negative.
Katey Evans said she didn’t know how long her husband, Kevin, will remain in the hospital.
“He sounds like he’s improving,” she said.
Evans said she, her husband and their three children went to get tested at a Walgreens pharmacy in Bridgeville last Friday after their 6-year-old daughter had tested positive earlier last week. All were told Tuesday that their results had come back negative.
On Thursday, Kevin Evans, 41, was taken by ambulance to Beebe Medical Center in Lewes, where a check of the Delaware Health Information Network, a statewide patient information database, indicated that he had tested positive for COVID-19. Katey Evans received the news from hospital officials while being forced to wait outside in the parking lot because of coronavirus protocols.
A short time later, Evans received a call from the Division of Public Health, purportedly to confirm that she had received her test results. She then asked the woman to confirm her husband’s results.
“She told me he was negative. She repeated it two times to me,” Evans said. “That’s when I asked to speak to her supervisor.”
In the meantime, Evans contacted state Sen. Brian Pettyjohn, R-Georgetown, whom she conferenced in on the call.
“They told her again that everybody was negative, and then she started pressing the issue and she got transferred to one of the epidemiologists,” Pettyjohn said.
Minutes later, Evans was told that her husband had, in fact, tested positive, but that his results had been thrown into a “default negative batch.”
Evans said Dr. Richard Pescatore, chief physician for the Division of Public, called her later Thursday morning and assured her that her husband was the only family member whose results had been misreported.
“He said, ‘You and all of your daughters are all negative,’” Evans recalled.
Just hours later, Pescatore called back and told her that her 6-year-old had actually tested positive.
“I’m like, ‘how does that happen?‘” Evans said. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
Evans said that while public health officials were quick to acknowledge their mistake, “they weren’t quick to issue any statement about it,” leaving it up to her to let the public know what was going on.
Evans said she was also told that the incorrect reporting was an isolated incident involving the Walgreens in Bridgeville, but a spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Services said the problem was not specific to the Bridgeville location.
“We do not have a breakdown by site,” DHSS spokesman Sean Dooley said in an email Friday after being asked for clarification.
State officials earlier this month announced a partnership with Walgreens to provide drive-thru COVID-19 testing at one Walgreens location in each county starting July 16. The Evans family was tested at the Bridgeville location the next day.
“In partnership with Walgreens, 2,791 samples were collected for processing through the Delaware Public Health Lab in the first week of testing,” Dooley wrote. “In the process of results delivery, 12 persons who tested positive for COVID-19 were inadvertently given negative results by phone due to an internal DPH system error.”
Officials said all reported results from the Walgreens testing sites were reviewed to ensure accuracy, and that no individuals who tested negative were given incorrect results. “Internal system improvements” have eliminated the possibility of the problem recurring, they said.
DHSS deputy secretary Molly Magarik, who will replace outgoing secretary Kara Odom Walker later this month, told Pettyjohn in an email that Kevin Evans’ test results were securely transmitted and reported as negative on Monday evening, even though the sample was positive. Magarik said the results had accurately been reported by a vendor’s laboratory information management system, or LIMS, into both the Delaware Health Information Network and the Delaware Electronic Reporting and Syndromic Surveillance System, a disease tracking system.
Magarik said that at the time of reporting, batch results produced from the LIMS lacked patient contact information and needed to be linked to patient contact information from the vendor’s database.
“During this synthesis, patient was dropped from the group of positive specimens, resulting in being listed as ’negative’ in the batch report,” she wrote.
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