As part of a review of corona test data last night, data from 27 laboratories from around the country were found to be irregular. • Ministry of Health: "Not yet delivered to patients, malfunction will be repaired in a few hours" • Senior officials: "The malfunction was discovered shortly and affected only hundreds of tests, not About thousands "

The Ministry of Health announced Saturday that a routine check of the reliability of test data last night revealed a number of conflicting data, so it may be that a person who turned out to be positive received a negative answer and vice versa. "In light of this, it was decided to carry out a comprehensive examination in all the laboratories of the test data carried out yesterday and not yet reported to the patients."

This is how the "check and run" method works // Photo: Shmuel Buchris

A Health Ministry official said: "The fault was discovered within hours." This means that the assessment has affected several hundred subjects and not many thousands. Also, in any case, the Ministry of Health decided to make a resale apartment for all samples. Maurice Dorfman, head of the Department of Computing and Digital Health at the Ministry of Health, clarifies: "These are 27 active labs across the country. The directive is only to stop the public at this time about the tests that were done last night. In our estimation, the problem will be fixed within a few hours."

Dorfman added: "Keep in mind that the labs work at the capacity of thousands of tests a day - we will soon reach 10,000 tests a day and in two weeks, according to the PM's 30,000-a-day directive, this is a very high level of testing done by the State of Israel and it increases the amount of work we all do. . It is important to emphasize that the lab teams are doing an excellent job and that the labs are operating at exceptional levels that will continue to grow and for 7 days a week. "

Esther Edmon, chairman of the Microbiologists, Biochemists and Laboratory Workers, says there is a problem of field and field disparity between the data published on the extent of patient sampling and their arrival in the laboratory. However, she says, "Every sample, from the time of arrival to each of the medical laboratories, during operating hours, is checked within 6 hours, and the answer is forwarded from the laboratories to the Ministry of Health, according to the protocol."

She claims the chain and the entire route should be checked, from the time the sample is taken, to the laboratory, and the manner in which the answer is provided by the Ministry of Health.

A health official said: "Last night around 11pm, we received a message from the Health Ministry to stop providing patient answers because there is a problem. This is a mega event. I don't know in numbers if ten people or a hundred or a thousand have been affected. Who got a positive answer even though they were negative and more serious than people who got a negative answer while they were positive. "

He also noted that "throughout the entire process we have seen that there is a delay in the answers. There have been occasions when people have had a positive morning and a negative evening. In my estimation, this whole thing did not work 100 percent."

The health funds explain that the tests are transferred to the laboratory - whether in a hospital or in one of the health funds, when at the end of the test all the data is sent to the Ministry of Health and each health fund receives the answers of its policyholders and its responsibility to deliver them to the policyholders. "We believe that the malfunction occurred in the answers that the laboratories sent to the Ministry of Health. This may be a wrong typing or there was a computer communication problem that caused some of the answers to change," another source at the box office said.