COVID-19 outbreaks declared over at several Regina care homes after false positives identified

Effective immediately, many of the long-term care homes in Regina believed to have experienced COVID-19 outbreaks will return to regular visitation.

The care homes include Regina Lutheran Home, Santa Maria, Extendicare Parkside, Extendicare Sunset, Regina Pioneer Village – Transitional Care Unit, and Wascana Rehabilitation Centre Unit 2-6.

Those outbreaks and suspected outbreaks were declared over because of a large number of false-positive tests stemming from what the province calls an “instrument error” at the Roy Romanow Provincial Laboratory.

During a news conference on Tuesday, the Saskatchewan Health Authority’s CEO Scott Livingstone apologized for the error and the distress it caused families.

He said the false positives were identified through the lab’s quality assurance processes.

“We have taken immediate action to mitigate the cause of the error. We are now confident in our testing processes going forward as we have been throughout the pandemic,” Livingstone said.

Outbreaks are still being investigated at three care homes: Extendicare Elmview, Regina Pioneer Village Complex Care Unit and Wascana Rehab Centre Mental Health Unit.

Visitation at these facilities is restricted to families of residents receiving end-of-life care.

The province says the lab error resulted in 255 invalid tests between Aug. 18-22.

After retesting, 206 were found to be false positives. Of those, at least 54 came from care homes in Regina.

“The primary impact was on Regina residents and Regina patients and staff. We do acknowledge that some errors impacted cases outside of Regina,” Livingstone said.

“We are currently working with individuals and locations impacted to get the appropriate notifications as well as to re-arrange re-testing for those individuals as well.”

According to a news release from the province, a “full reconciliation of the data” will be completed on Thursday.

The discovery of false positives was alarming for Fergall Magee, director of the Roy Romanow Provincial Lab.

“We may be in the background but 70 per cent of decisions about patient care come from some result in a lab so we take this very seriously and are very concerned and extremely sorry that this has happened. Nobody wants to cause people duress,” Magee said.

Magee said an investigation is needed into the cause of the error and to determine further measures that would prevent it from happening again.

“Is it an issue of swab? Is it an issue of reagent? Is it an issue of instrument? Is it an issue of process? We’re actually in the process of doing that,” he said.