New Mexico Department of Health erroneously resends thousands of coronavirus test results

The New Mexico Department of Health erroneously sent about 30,000 messages this week informing people they had tested negative for COVID-19.

According to Marisa Maez, a spokeswoman for the department, the notification was limited to people who previously tested negative for the coronavirus. Because of a "technical hiccup" sparked by a software update, she said, thousands of people received a repeated notification about an old test.

Among those who received the messages Monday were about 1,600 people awaiting new test results, Maez said.

"Our software provider was updating the provider portal on our COVID website last night and as a result there was a technological glitch that (erroneously) sent some … notifications to people who had previously tested negative," Maez said Tuesday. "The texts were basically repeats of those prior notifications … even though the recipients had not recently tested."

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Maez said the software provider and the Department of Health were sending out new messages apologizing for the error and asking people to disregard the testing notifications.

The messages were not "a result of any malicious attack" and officials were "not concerned this was a result of a scam or hack," she said.

The problem sparked concern among people who received a test in the past and others who were awaiting results of a new test.

"It's kind of terrifying," said Jen Stillions, a Santa Fe resident who posted about the message in a community Facebook forum.

Stillions said she was awaiting the results of a recent coronavirus test and even sent a text message about the negative result to a volunteer coordinator for a hospice care center where she lends a hand. At first, Stillions said, she thought the Department of Health might have switched to the use of rapid tests because she received her results so quickly.

Stillions said a state health official reached out to her through Facebook messaging and said some people in the department might have suspected at first the messages sent in error did not originate from the department. But when Stillions called the hotline included in the message, she said, a nurse told her it was simply a glitch.

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Stillions said she worries other people awaiting a COVID-19 test might have seen the old result "and thought they were OK and went out and exposed a bunch of people. That's pretty catastrophic, if you ask me."

Another Santa Fe resident, Karen Baker, said she and her husband both received the testing messages, though they hadn't been tested for the virus in a month or more.

She called the Department of Health and was told the agency was investigating whether the messages were tied to a scam. The person she spoke with told her the department had received some 100 phone calls about the messages Monday night.

"She said it seems like somebody was able to get into our system and her advice was don't click on any links, just delete it," Baker said. "And I did delete it. My concern is how much this will erode confidence in the system that the DOH has set up."