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Punishing coronavirus testing lab for failures a balancing act amid Hong Kong’s pandemic battle: Carrie Lam
- Calling mainland-backed BGI a ‘very important partner’ in ramping up screenings, chief executive says city weighed potentially negative impact of levying harsher sanctions against firm
- Recent probe found sample contamination may have led to an unusually high number of preliminary-positive cases emerging from facility
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Hong Kong’s decision to suspend some, but not all, of the services provided by a coronavirus testing lab whose false-positive results led to a number of people being incorrectly quarantined was necessary to maintain the city’s pandemic fighting capabilities, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said on Tuesday.
BGI, a private, mainland China-backed firm linked to at least three separate testing controversies, has seen its right to operate mobile screening stations suspended, though its seven community testing centres are being allowed to operate as usual.
The Department of Health confirmed to the Post that 26 of the 30 preliminary-positive cases reported by BGI last Wednesday were later found to be false positives, with a recent expert investigation pointing to sample contamination as the likely culprit.
Quarantine orders issued for close contacts of those involved were in the process of being rescinded.
Separately, health authorities also revealed a mix-up in the vaccination records of five city residents who took the BioNTech vaccine at a centre operated by another contractor, only for their official records to show they had been inoculated with the Sinovac version.
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