Reporting issue from The Broad Institute

Dear members of the Mount Holyoke College community,

Recently, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who processes the COVID-19 tests for Mount Holyoke and a number of institutions across the Northeast, made a reporting error that impacted two members of the Mount Holyoke College community. We are letting the community know about this error in the spirit of full transparency. We emphasize, however, that this is a reporting issue, not a health and safety issue, nor a testing issue. 

The Broad Institute has provided the following statement:

 “Between Friday, October 16 and Saturday, October 17, a reporting error resulted in 9 erroneous results being communicated, out of approximately 154,000 samples processed over these two days.

 The reporting errors led to

• in 2 cases (both at Mount Holyoke), people who had tested negative incorrectly receiving a message that they had tested positive,
• in 3 cases (elsewhere), people who had tested positive incorrectly receiving a message that they had tested negative; and 
• in 4 additional cases (elsewhere), a negative result was reported as inconclusive, or vice versa. Inconclusive results happen occasionally, and might require a re-test.

Corrections were issued within approximately 12 hours of the initial erroneous report. It then took additional time for the two incorrectly reported positive results to be corrected in state databases.

The cause appears to have been human error, which occurred in the course of scanning barcodes into our database, and is extremely rare.

We are working on ways to modify the process to ensure that this error doesn't happen again. We are also revisiting our protocols for sending corrections, to ensure more extensive outreach in the event we need to issue an updated result in the future.

We know that receiving a positive diagnosis is distressing. It triggers public health protocols, including quarantining and contact tracing. 

We sincerely apologize to the individuals and health officials impacted.”

We, too, regret the distress caused by this situation and encourage anyone at the College with questions about Mount Holyoke’s COVID-19 testing, protocols or reporting to reach out to us directly or email covid19info@mtholyoke.edu. 

Be well,

Karen Engell
Director of Health Services

Paul S. Kandel
Strategic IT Project Management Lead
COVID-19 Testing & Tracing Project Manager