Recent KCDC Announcement Confirms COVID-19 Test Count Errors... Daily Discrepancies of Over 40,000 Cases (Update)

[Asia Economy Reporter Jang Hyowon] The quarantine authorities confirmed errors in the number of COVID-19 tests announced over the past six days and have corrected all of them.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) Central Disease Control Headquarters (CDCH) announced on the 8th that it would revise the number of suspected COVID-19 cases tested, which had been announced around 9:30 a.m. from the 2nd to the 7th for six days.

In addition to the initial tests conducted on suspected COVID-19 infections, tests before quarantine release, interim tests, and periodic tests were included, and duplicate tests of the same individual were excluded.

The KDCA explained, "Until last year, duplicate cases were automatically excluded by the computer system, but from the tests conducted on the 1st of this year (announced on the 2nd), the system did not exclude duplicates, causing errors."

The number of suspected cases tested announced by the KDCA from the 2nd to the 7th was 23,937 to 42,483 higher than the corrected figures.

Since the number of suspected COVID-19 cases tested and the number of tests at temporary screening clinics announced daily by the CDCH are all provisional figures, they have been continuously adjusted so far. However, this is the first time that tens of thousands of cases per day over six days were changed all at once due to a system issue.

As the KDCA corrected the number of suspected cases tested, which had been announced up to about 40,000 cases higher per day, the test positivity rate, considered a 'quarantine indicator,' also rose slightly from 1.6?1.7% daily to around 2%.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.