Officials are trying to figure how 249 Covid-19 tests performed at the Barre Auditorium sat undelivered for 50 hours at a Massachusetts shipping point over the weekend, and were no longer fresh enough to be processed.
Mike Smith, Agency of Human Services secretary, apologized for that mistake at a press conference Tuesday, and for another: The state mass-emailed notifications to the people who’d been tested but failed to conceal their email addresses, potentially revealing private health information.
“None of this should have happened,” he said. “It is not the fault of the individuals who took the test; they were doing the right thing getting a Covid test.”
Smith said after the tests were performed Friday and shipped via UPS to a building in Massachusetts, the samples sat for 50 hours, making them unusable. The state is investigating why the delay occurred and why the email addresses were revealed.
“Actions need to happen to ensure that this incident isn’t repeated,” he said. “My office will oversee the review of our processes and reforms in breakdowns of anything that we find.”
Smith said the state would do anything in its power to ensure people whose tests were lost could get another test within 24 hours.
Gov. Phil Scott urged the Vermonters affected to show up to testing sites immediately.
“Even if I have to drive all the samples of myself from Barre, to the state lab in Colchester, we’ll get it done in the next 24 hours,” Scott said.
He declined to assign blame yet to the shipping company or an individual state employee, saying that it’s too soon to understand why the problem occurred. The state has conducted thousands of tests, and this is the first time there has been “a slip-up of this magnitude,” he said.
The test loss and the email issues were first reported Monday by the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.
The state has vastly expanded its testing and tracing efforts in recent weeks, Smith said, adding 14 pop-up testing locations across the state and upgrading the frequency of testing in long-term care facilities to biweekly.
“The state has a robust testing system with plenty of supplies on hand,” Smith said. “But the most important thing is for testing to be trusted by Vermonters.”
The state has also expanded its contact tracing team, which now includes the equivalent of 100 full-time staff members, and it can handle up to 260 contacts per day, Smith said. For the week of Nov. 18, the state reported 667 close contacts were named in a week.
The state plans to begin reaching out to close contacts via text initially, before reaching out via phone, Smith said.
Antigen testing numbers added
More than a month after Vermont began receiving tens of thousands of antigen tests from the federal government, it will begin including some antigen test results in its data, said Dr. Mark Levine, commissioner of the Department of Health.
Levine had previously expressed concern about how useful the antigen tests were, considering their high false negativity rate. But he said they had proven helpful in combating outbreaks in long-term care facilities.
“When an outbreak has already occurred in a long-term care facility, by definition, it has a higher prevalence of virus than it’s ever had before,” Levine said. “And you want to be able to make rapid decisions regarding triage patients and staff and cohorting of them so that infections don’t spread.”
The new data will be added as of Wednesday, and will include 120 presumptive positive test results since Sept. 6, Levine said. An antigen test is considered presumptive positive if the person tested positive and was symptomatic.
Thanksgiving travel numbers show good news
Location data showed a drop in Thanksgiving travel compared to last year, an encouraging sign for the weeks ahead, said Michael Pieciak, commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation, who led the state’s latest data.
The number of travelers at Burlington International Airport was 77% lower than last year, according to the presentation, and the statewide mobility rate — how often and how far people travel — also dropped after the governor’s banned multi-household gatherings and imposed other restrictions.
“Over the past two weeks, our mobility data indicates that Vermonters have decreased their movement, spending more time at home, and commuting less often to workplaces,” Pieciak said.
That reduced mobility may be one reason case counts have been dropping in Vermont in the past few days. The state reported 475 cases in the past week, down from 681 the week before.
However, the state also reported fewer tests than normal were conducted during the long holiday weekend, according to Department of Health data.
Statewide, Vermont colleges are ending their first semester with a final tally of 238 cases and a positivity rate of 0.11%, compared to Maine and New Hampshire’s 0.18%.
“Vermont’s colleges and university certainly did a remarkable job keeping their students, their staff and their communities safe during this very unusual, and challenging semester,” Pieciak said.