Inquiry into suspicious COVID-19 entries launched

LAHORE:The Primary & Secondary Healthcare Department has launched an inquiry into over 1,883 suspicious entries on the COVID dashboard from August 23 to 31. The entries were made by eight towns during a smart sampling campaign. Upon indication of suspicious entries by an independent monitoring team, the Primary & Secondary Healthcare Department secretary launched a probe.

During initial investigations, 626 entries were found with invalid contact details, 159 entries were those where the sample was not even taken by teams whereas 1,098 had wrong numbers or addresses. On the basis of the findings, the head of sampling teams, the District Health Officer (DHO), has been put under suspension while an inquiry has been ordered to name all those responsible for the misconduct. Speaking about the incident, a spokesperson for the Primary & Secondary Healthcare Department informed reporter that 9,764 samples were taken during the eight days out of which 1,883 fake entries were detected. The best part of the incident is that fake entries were detected by the system itself which makes the system foolproof. The spokesperson added that the entries were made to cheat the system and to avoid taking samples but the efficiency of the system successfully resisted the malicious effort. He said that COVID-19 data was very important in national decision making. He added a report in a newspaper of fake entries to show less positive cases in Punjab was misleading. There is no truth it. In fact, the fake entries impacted overall positivity or otherwise progression of cases as the entries were stopped by the system before being calculated into overall results.