A surgical clinic in Melbourne stood down staff and began rescheduling surgery after the Victorian health department falsely told a health worker she was positive for Covid-19 after twice telling her she was negative.

Kerry Shepherd, a practice manager at an orthopaedic surgical clinic, was tested for the virus on 17 July and went into isolation until she received a text from the department of health on 23 July to say she was negative for the virus, and so returned to work. On 25 July, she received a second text message confirming she had tested negative.

But on the same evening Shepherd saw she had three missed calls from the health department and a message that she was positive. Shepherd said she panicked because after being told she was negative she had been to grocery stores and to her workplace, coming into contact with health staff and patients.

“I was horrified,” Shepherd said. “I am quite new to the role as I started two weeks before the pandemic and I was so scared, I worried I had brought disaster down on their heads. I obviously notified my bosses and the whole clinic would have to close, be deep cleaned, and all patient surgery would need to be cancelled as our clinic is small, we all work closely and all staff would have to be furloughed and tested. My partner is an emergency doctor so he was forced to call off on a shift that was already short-staffed, and get tested too.”

But Shepherd was in fact negative. She called the national hotline to ask about the discrepancy in results because by the time she received the positive result, the Victorian hotline was closed.

“The person I spoke to at the national hotline said I was definitely positive but she didn’t have access to the actual result, and then on Sunday 26th of July I called the Victorian onsite doctor result hotline and they said they would look into it. Two hours later they called to say there had been a clerical error, my file number had been mistyped and also that my form was literally put in a wrong pile and they treated me as a positive case when I was definitely negative.”

Shepherd said while she had a “lot of empathy” for the contact tracers and the health department as they dealt with a huge workload, she was concerned about the consequences of the error, and the lack of clarity around how it happened. The final confirmation of her negative result was not communicated throughout the departments involved, and on Monday Shepherd received a call from Victoria police asking why she was not at home. She was at work.

On the same day, her partner and colleagues all received notification that they were close contacts and would need to quarantine. Again, Shepherd called the state results hotline. “[They said] it’s probably an automated system that wasn’t updated after they fixed my incorrect result, but the contact tracers will need to contact the pathology provider before they can send confirmation out to everyone. In the meantime I have surgeons who are in the middle of consulting lists and don’t know whether to follow official directions and cancel all patients until they hear otherwise, or take the department’s verbal advice that it’s incorrect and, technically illegally, keep going,” she said.

The health department did not respond to a request for comment. Shepherd said she was concerned positive patients might have been told they were negative, and about the broader disruptions of a false result, especially in clinical settings.

“However, there were also people going above and beyond,” she said. “A supervisor at the Onsite Doctor Results Hotline was absolutely instrumental in getting this fixed. He was in no way responsible for the initial error, and I’m sure had no real responsibility to remedy it. But he investigated the issue thoroughly after my first call, found out what had happened, and then single-handedly sorted it out with every single person and department possible including contact tracers, police, pathology and the department of health – while making sure I was kept updated and received the written confirmation I needed.

“Without him working so hard behind the scenes, I’d still be stuck at the first hurdle of trying to sort this mess out.”

The premier, Daniel Andrews, said in a media conference on Monday “people in our labs are doing … their absolute best” given the volume of tests they were working through.

“The point I’m making beyond that is we don’t have capacity to do 100,000 tests a day. There are limits and if you look at our average over the last three to four weeks, it’s certainly higher than 25,000 [per day]. It’s a very significant amount of testing. We’re grateful to everyone coming forward and getting tested.”