Mistakes at a testing laboratory caused tens of thousands of positive COVID-19 cases to be reported as negative and may have led to the deaths of roughly 20 people.

According to England's government department in charge of handling public health emergencies with over 177,000 fatalities caused by the coronavirus since the pandemic began in 2020, Britain has one of the greatest mortality rates in the world.

The contact tracing program, according to many experts, was far from the "world-beating" system the administration had promised.

The Immensa laboratory in central England was found to have falsely recorded almost 39,000 tests as negative when they should have been positive between September 2 and October 12 of the last year, and the errors were caused by the improper threshold settings for reporting positive and negative findings of PCR samples for COVID-19 according to an examination by the UK's Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

UKHSA, the errors could have resulted in up to 55,000 more illnesses in the regions where the erroneous negatives were reported.

The private company Immensa Health Clinic, which operates the lab, was established in May 2020 and has received contracts worth 170 million pounds ($203.63 million) to process PCR test results.

The owners of Immensa, Dante Labs, did not right away respond to a request for comment.

Richard Gleave, head of the UKHSA and the investigation's lead, said, "Through this investigation, we have looked carefully at the mechanisms in place for managing contracts of private labs providing surge testing during this time."

He added National Health Service (NHS) Test and Trace could not have done anything differently to stop this error from happening at the private lab. However, our analysis outlines specific suggestions to lessen the likelihood that occurrences like this will occur again.