Matt Hancock: Covid data glitch did not affect policy decisions
A technical glitch that resulted in almost 16,000 positive Covid cases not recorded in the official data last week did not affect the government’s policy decisions, according to health secretary Matt Hancock.
The government implemented more stringent lockdown restrictions in the North West last week, including in Liverpool, but the health secretary said no other measures would have been implemented if the glitch did not happen.
Hancock told MPs today that the glitch happened due to a “failure of the automated transfer of data” between Covid testing labs and Public Health England, and that the Joint Biosecurity Centre believed “this has not impacted decisions about local action that was taken last week”.
“The just under 16,000 cases were essentially evenly spread, so it hasn’t changed the shape of the epidemic – it has changed the level in terms of where we are finding the epidemic and in what sorts of groups,” he said.
Hancock added: “This incident should never have happened, but the team has acted swiftly to minimise its impact.
“The problem emerged in a PHE legacy system and we had already decided in July to replace this system and I commissioned a new data system to replace the legacy one and contracts were awarded in August and work on the upgrade is underway.”
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The glitch occurred last week and led to contacts of the positive cases not being traced, meaning thousands of people may have had the virus without knowing it.
Labour shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth estimated that the number of contacts not traced was 48,000 people.
The health secretary said only about half of the contacts had been traced so far.
“As of 9am this morning 51 per cent of these cases have been contacted by the contact trace system and their contacts are contacted immediately after that initial contact – so concurrently,” he said.
Ashworth hit out at the government for its handling of the data loss.
“This is not just a shambles, it’s so much worse than that,” he said.
“And it gives me no comfort to say it – it’s putting lives at risk, and he should apologise.”