Rep. Eric Go Yap negative for COVID-19; RITM apologizes for mistake

MANILA, Philippines (Update 1, 7:51 p.m.) — Party-list Rep. Eric Go Yap (ACT-CIS party-list) is negative for the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine said on Friday, admitting its mistake of earlier declaring him positive.

“We wish to publicly apologize to Hon. Erick (sic) Go Yap of ACT-CIS Partylist for forwarding a report of his COVID-19 results that displayed a clerical oversight,” the institute said in a statement.

The mistake was discovered late Thursday night, a day after the congressman unwittingly disclosed his “infection.”

"His results are by no means a false positive. This isolated incident was brought about by an encoding error which was discovered late last night by the Molecular Biology Laboratory of the [Department of Health-RITM]," it explained.

"We maintain that our testing process is compliant with the World Health Organization protocol and that our results remain accurate despite this incident.”

The RITM then "washed hands" from the mistake, attributing it to the mistake of one person.

"The individual responsible for the incident was enlisted as an augmentation staff from outside the regular workforce of the laboratory. Said employee is already being dealt with administratively."

They assured the public that all test results have since been reviewed and said that the error with Yap's results is "isolated."

“We have also added another layer of verification for all succeeding reports we will submit. We promise that this, and other associated incidents, will never happen again.”

RELATED: Rep. Eric Go Yap tests positive for COVID-19

On Wednesday, Yap announced that he tested positive for COVID-19.

"It is with a heavy heart that I share to all of you that I tested positive for coronavirus," the solon said in a statement.

According to Yap, he had himself tested on March 15 and was called about the results only on Wednesday, ten days after he was tested. — with reports from Franco Luna