(Yicai Global) July 6 -- More than 250 Covid-19 nucleic acid testing agencies have been ordered to correct their practices or have had their licenses revoked after China launched a nationwide investigation last month following the frequent reporting of inaccurate test results amid the recent Covid-19 outbreaks.

Some 238 labs were told to smarten up their acts and 15 have been struck off, according to the findings of 14 provincial-level regions, including Guangdong province and Beijing, that have been released so far.

Central Hunan province was the worst performer with 103 agencies found to be lacking, followed by southwestern Sichuan province with 47 and northeastern Liaoning province with 23.

Some even had their employees arrested for obstructing infectious disease prevention. Three staff members of Beijing Zhongtong Lanbo Medical Testing Laboratory were seized by police yesterday and several from Beijing Jinzhun Medical Testing Laboratory and Beijing Pushi Medical Laboratory have been arrested for the same crime.

Both Beijing and Shanghai, which were hard-hit by the recent flare-ups, often reported inaccurate Covid-19 test results. On June 2, the country's cabinet demanded strict verification of the qualifications of testing agencies and their staff and a clamp down on unqualified ones.

Frequent quality control incidents can spark the public's distrust, which is not conducive to pandemic control and prevention, a person from a nucleic acid testing firm told Yicai Global earlier.

China’s Covid-19 testing sector has been expanding quickly to exceed CNY10 billion (USD1.5 billion) in scale amid new outbreaks with fresh agencies, mass hiring and reduced unit prices. As big cities' testing demand surges, new third-party testing institutions have mushroomed with higher capacity and lowered prices.

But as the workload increases, so do mistakes. "Some inexperienced testing agencies have a wrong estimate of their testing capacity before taking large-scale testing tasks, leading them to neglect quality control when racing against time to finish,” a source told Yicai Global.

China has 13,000 healthcare institutions with 153,000 employees qualified to do nucleic acid testing, Guo Yanhong, a supervision specialist at the National Health Commission, said recently. The institutions can test as many as 57 million tubes per day, she added.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Kim Taylor