More than 60,000 people in New South Wales got a nasty COVID-19 surprise this week when they were sent texts wrongly advising they’d tested positive for coronavirus.
NSW Health blamed a “technical error” for the mistake on Monday, and said it had quickly sent follow-up texts to explain the unexpected notifications.
The messages told 60,700 recipients they had returned a positive test result, and detailed how to get anti-viral medicine and what to do if they fell seriously sick.
A NSW Health spokesperson told 9news.com.au the tranche of erroneous messages was being “thoroughly investigated”.
The spokesperson said the texts should be ignored if people hadn’t tested positive on a PCR test or registered a positive rapid antigen test result in recent days.
“We are investigating the technical error that caused these text messages to be sent,” they added.
“NSW Health subsequently texted those who received the initial message to advise it was sent in error and to apologise.”
More than seven million of these COVID-19 texts have been sent since the pandemic began, three years ago.
The text is sent to people after they test positive on a PCR test or report a positive rapid antigen test result.
An example of an incorrect notification was soon posted on social media.
One user’s post showed a “positive” test result dating back to 2021, and they responded with a return text saying, “Stop sending rubbish to my mobile phone”.
“How strange to receive that text when you didn’t even take a test,” one user wrote.
“I knew NSW Health had back logs, but to wait over 2 years to tell you? That’s hilarious,” another posted.
NSW Health has correctly reported 6033 positive tests in the last week.