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 Britain reported a jump in daily COVID-19 cases to a record 22,961
on Sunday, after authorities said a technical issue had meant that
over 15,000 test results had not been transferred into computer
systems on time, including for contact tracers.
"The glitch has been found and fixed and I'm sure that the changes
are brought in straight away to make sure this sort of problem
doesn't happen again," Coffey told Times Radio.
Coffey told Sky News that Public Health England had identified the
problem and had been corrected.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock will update parliament on the mishap
later on Monday, she said.
News of the glitch was likely to cast further doubt over Prime
Minister Boris Johnson's handling of the COVID-19 outbreak: his
government's response has been cast by political opponents as slow,
poorly organised and confusing.
Johnson, who promised a "world-beating" test-and-trace system, says
there have been missteps but that the government has faced the
biggest health crisis since the 1918 influenza outbreak.
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The technical problem, which was identified on Friday and has now been resolved,
led to 15,841 cases not being uploaded into reporting dashboards used by the
National Health Service (NHS) contact-tracing system.
"We fully understand the concern this may cause and further robust measures have
been put in place as a result," said PHE's interim chief executive, Michael
Brodie.
The authority said that all the people concerned had been given their results in
a timely fashion, and that those with positive results had been told to
self-isolate.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Estelle Shirbon and William Schomberg; editing
by Kate Holton and Michael Holden)
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