A mix-up over COVID-19 results by a third party lab forced Florida's Department of Health to stop it's daily numbers report Saturday, according to health officials.
Helix Laboratory sent approximately 400,000 previously-recorded COVID-19 test results to the Department of Health Friday night. Officials say the "massive" amount of data needed to be de-duplicated, and prevented the department's automatic reporting system from processing the results.
"State epidemiologists are currently working to reconcile the data, which will take a day to finish," FDOH said in a statement.
FDOH has released COVID-19 number reports nearly every day. The information not only includes the total number of cases in the state, but hospitalizations, deaths and more.
The state's daily report will resume Sunday.
Editor's note: On Tuesday, three days after this story was first published, Helix sent a statement that reads, "Helix submitted results in accordance with the Florida Statute and DOH procedures and was not at fault for this incident. On the day in question, we submitted approximately 3,000 reports, in line with our testing volumes from that day. As far as we can tell, our transmission was normal. Due to an unforeseen technical issue not caused by Helix, however, previously reported historical data was repeated. We continue to work with the Department of Health to understand exactly what happened and why our historical data was impacted."
