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Due to the laboratory’s transmission system not working properly, the crown numbers in the canton of Zurich were incorrect for the last nine days.
As soon as the result of a PCR test is available, it should be automatically sent to the authorities. But exactly this function was not programmed correctly.
Denise Biella * is confused: “Do I have Covid or do I not have Covid?”
On October 25, the 28-year-old was tested for the corona virus at Limmattal Hospital. The next day, the positive result came with the instruction to go into quarantine. The contact tracer would call Biella in the next few days to discuss how to proceed, he said at the hospital. But the call did not come.
A week later, Biella contacted the tracking team herself. A woman told her that she was not registered as a positive case of Covid-19, so she would never have been contacted. “Do I have Covid or do I not have Covid?” Biella asks by phone.
The question is legitimate. Because neither she, nor her mother nor her friends, parents or siblings were contacted through contact tracing. They all also tested positive on different days. When asked, they all got the same answer: not registered as a Covid-19 case. What’s going on here?
“You can’t imagine how incredibly annoying it is,” Alexandra Trkola says over the phone. Trkola is the director of the Institute for Medical Virology at the University of Zurich, which evaluates daily PCR tests in clinics in and around the canton of Zurich. Here up to six hundred tests are entered into a machine every day. In it, the virus is broken down, the RNA genome is purified and examined.
“The results of some of the tests we conducted could not be transmitted to the canton or the BAG due to an IT problem,” says Trkola. Specifically: In the past nine days, around 400 positive test results failed to reach the cantonal health department or contact tracing. Trkola makes it clear: “The affected people knew immediately of their infection, but were not instructed by the trace.”
According to Trkola, the problem is due to a disabled script on the lab’s computer system. When a PCR test is evaluated, the IT system transfers the test result from the machine to the internal laboratory information system. There the results are reviewed again by the diagnosticians and, if everything was evaluated correctly, sent to the hospital on the one hand and transmitted to the authorities on the other.
“After we realized this, we discovered that the script, which is responsible for the automatic transmission of the results to the cantonal authorities, was incorrect,” says Trkola. “We are sorry for this breakdown.” In the future, they will check daily if the results have been sent.
BAG and Zurich have wrong numbers
All the results have been communicated to the authorities and the affected hospitals have been informed. “The figures published daily by the health department and the BAG should be corrected for the period in question,” says Trkola.
Normally, even a single missing lab report would have been recognized. Because a positive case is always reported twice: in addition to laboratory reports, the canton also receives medical reports from the hospital. Doctors report positive results, but also specifically address the patient’s symptoms.
Since both law enforcement and tracking are currently on the attack, lab reports are processed first. Physician notifications are only reviewed in a second step. Normally, a discrepancy of four hundred cases would have been quickly noticed. “We have not heard from the canton,” says Trkola. “So I assume the doctor’s reports from the last week could not be processed.”
The Health Directorate confirms this indirectly. “In order for contact tracing to report index cases and contact persons immediately, the health department relies on the fact that the process runs smoothly for everyone involved,” writes spokeswoman Lina Lanz upon request. Contact tracing only begins as soon as the lab reports reach the health department. This also means that four hundred people have not been located in the last nine days. “The cases were recorded retrospectively today in the situation bulletin,” writes Lanz.
Meanwhile, to relieve the doctors, BAG has announced that it will dispense with some of the medical reports. Since October 28, doctors no longer have to see a doctor for people who have undergone the test on an outpatient basis. “A possible falsification of individual parameters, such as symptoms, is justified after careful consideration from the perspective of the BAG in the current situation,” the Federal Office writes on request. However, hospitalized patients, nursing home residents, and the deceased will continue to be recorded and reported to a physician.
Twenty flight attendants are supposed to keep track
With or without IT breakdown: Zurich’s contact tracing is overloaded. The Health Directorate writes on its website: “Due to the large number of cases currently, it is no longer possible for us to contact people who have tested positive for Covid-19 and their close contact persons immediately by telephone”. She asks the population for help.
This means: Anyone who is not contacted by the tracking team must go into quarantine on their own initiative, actively inform the trackers, and inform their environment themselves.
At the same time, the canton plans to further expand tracking. Among other things, twenty Swiss flight attendants were trained and temporarily employed by the private search company JDMT. More could follow.
Cantonal tracking capabilities were originally designed to track one hundred cases per day. After several cases of club over-propagation became known, the cantonal contact tracker sought help from private providers such as JDMT ahead of schedule.
But in the meantime, the data cannot be fully recorded even with outside help. As of this week, the canton of Zurich can no longer identify where someone was infected. “Due to the high number of cases today, data on the context of contagion cannot currently be collected to an extent that allows satisfactory views or interpretations,” the health department writes on its website.
On Thursday, the health department wants to report on additional steps related to contact tracing.
Denise Biella was lucky: she was finally able to reach the tracers herself. The information about the quarantine came just in time. “Otherwise, it would have left a day earlier.”
* Name known to publisher
