Immensa Covid test lab concerns ignored by Test and Trace

Pam Bembenek died after contracting Covid in her care home

Concerns raised about dangerous discrepancies at a Covid testing lab which has since been blamed for causing an estimated 23 deaths were ignored by health officials for months.

Documents show Public Health Wales flagged "significant concerns" about results from Immensa, in Wolverhampton, in letters to colleagues in England.

They were told nothing was wrong and testing resumed in September 2021.

Letters were released after a Freedom of Information request by the Times.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said as many as 39,000 positive results were wrongly reported as negative in September and October 2021, mostly originating from south-west England.

Lab errors led to about 39,000 people being given incorrect results

It found opportunities were missed in its Test and Trace's investigations which led to a delay in identifying the problem. But it concluded no single action could have prevented the errors.

However, the newly-released documents show health officials in Wales alerted Test and Trace to the possibility of inaccurate results in February 2021 after they found the positivity rate was more than five times higher than elsewhere - raising the possibility of contamination.

Test and Trace responded to say an internal audit had found "no evidence" of discrepancies.

But concerns in Wales were so acute, health staff halted sending any more of their Covid tests to Immensa in March that year. They said their analysis showed 6,377 out of 39,694 results appeared to have been wrongly reported.

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Amber Marshall, of Gloucester, whose grandmother Pan Bembenek died from Covid after her care worker was given a false negative result, said she was "incredulous" at the revelations.

"It does seem to be a bit of an exercise in British politeness and understatement saying 'could you possibly look into this a bit more, the results seem a bit surprising' when what they mean is 'the results are clearly wrong, something needs to be looked at'."

Immensa was paid more than £100m to carry out Covid testing for the NHS during the pandemic.

The UKHSA said a total of about 400,000 samples had been processed at the lab in the West Midlands.

The BBC asked the director of labs at Test and Trace at the time if she would like to comment. But Prof Dame Anna Dominiczak referred us to a statement by the UKHSA which said measures had been taken to prevent a repeat of the mistakes.

Amber Marshall's grandmother died from the virus five days after she caught it

Prof Alan McNally, who set up the lighthouse labs during the pandemic, said there had been a failure to involve people with appropriate expertise in quality control.

He said there should have been an "in-depth investigation of why the data was fluctuating so wildly, and how they were calling results and whether or not that was robust enough".

Richard Gleave, director and lead investigator for the Immensa probe at UKHSA, said: "Our report has already clearly set out the concerns that Public Health Wales raised with NHS Test and Trace in February 2021, and the NHS Test and Trace response in March 2021.

"When we discovered the issues with Immensa, we took action to implement improvements to reduce the risk of incidents like this happening again and are working closely with our counterparts in other UK countries to ensure any future concerns are addressed and investigated rapidly."