41 Cal Poly students were told they had COVID. They didn’t, but 13 might after isolation
Forty-one Cal Poly students were mistakenly told they had COVID-19 due to a technical error at a third-party lab, university administration announced Wednesday evening.
Then 13 of those students might have accidentally been exposed again while in isolation for their false positives.
In an email to the campus community Wednesday, President Jeffrey Armstrong, vice president for student affairs Keith Humphrey and Tina Hadaway-Mellis, assistant vice president for student affairs, health and wellbeing, wrote that university administrators recently noted a “concerning, rapid increase we were seeing in the rate of positive COVID-19 tests among our students.”
According to the email, Avellino Lab, which conducts Cal Poly’s asymptomatic COVID-19 tests, reported “a significantly higher number of positive tests from samples collected on one particular day, compared to the positivity trend rates we had been seeing for campus.”
Administrators noted the “unexpected spike” and asked Avellino Lab to process those tests again to reconfirm the results, according to the email.
On Tuesday, Avellino reportedly informed Cal Poly that there was a “technician error in Avellino’s lab processing,” and 41 tests had mistakenly been reported as positive.
In a statement, Avellino Lab spokesperson Lisa Spicer said the “false positive outcomes were determined to be the result of an isolated incident of human error. This incident was an anomaly, one that is being immediately addressed with retraining and technology safeguards.”
The lab has conducted about 40,000 tests for Cal Poly since November.
Cal Poly notified the students of the error and went about confirming that they were free of COVID-19 and able to resume their normal activities, the San Luis Obispo university said.
Twenty-eight of those students were cleared, but 13 were determined to have potentially been exposed to students in isolation who had previously tested positive for COVID-19, according to the email.
When on-campus students are notified they may have coronavirus, they are moved out of their current living areas and placed in isolation in on- or off-campus facilities where they are provided with support services, according to Cal Poly’s coronavirus response website.
Students living off campus are asked by the university to isolate at home for at least 10 days.
The isolation order is enforced by the San Luis Obispo County Public Health Department, in conjunction with the university.
As of Wednesday, 75 on-campus students were in isolation, while 167 were self-quarantined, Cal Poly said.
An additional 494 on campus-students were in “quarantine in place” — which happens when an entire floor or section of university housing is ordered to quarantine for 14 days as a precaution.
According to the email, the 13 students who may once again have been exposed to COVID-19 have been moved to individual isolation quarters and are receiving testing to determine their current health status.
Cal Poly previously planned to stop using Avellino Labs and instead implement its own in-house saliva testing procedure for all students, the email reads.
That change is expected to happen with the next two weeks, according to the email.
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 8:15 PM.
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