THE SCOTTISH Government has been accused of "peddling widely inaccurate data" after revised Test and Protect stats revealed officials failed to contact around half of recent positive cases within 24 hours of being told of their results.

Public Health Scotland has been forced to revise its Test and Protect statistics after admitting that the data contained errors – with the update showing the system is performing up to five times worse than previously claimed.

The updated data highlights that in five of eight weeks in September and October, Test and Protect officials did not contact about half of positive cases within 24 hours of being notified of swab results, the Scottish Sun reported.

Public Health Scotland said a “coding error” was responsible for overestimating the number of people contacted within 24 hours of testing positive for the virus or the Test and Protect system being notified.

The revision shows that the proportion of those testing positive being alerted within 24 hours of Test and Protect being notified even dropped as low as 41.7 per cent in one of the weeks.

Following the revision, overall positive cases waiting more than 24 hours to be interviewed after Test and Protect was notified was amended from 8,262 to 15,291 and contact tracing cases taking more than a day to complete increase from 17,225 to 23,828.

Data for the week ending Octiber 25 had orignially showed that 29.3 per cent of cases were contacted within 24 hours of a test being taken - but that figure has been revised to just 7.5 per cent.

Speaking to the Scottish Sun, Labour health spokesperson, Monica Lennon, warned that people living in tough tier three restrictions “will feel let down” by the failures.

She added: “The Scottish Government must get its act together.”

Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said: "To discover the SNP government has been peddling wildly inaccurate data to the public is shocking. It beggars belief that this has gone unnoticed for months.

"However, it's not just about dodgy data, this risks harming our ability to fight the spread of the virus.

"We need answers and reassurance on this as a matter of urgency."

Scottish Liberal Democrat Willie Rennie said: “We need an urgent statement to Parliament on how these suspect statistics were ever published. Test and Protect was meant to be a major line of our defences against the rise of the virus yet now we discover it has weak flanks.

“For months I have been asking the First Minister about the performance of Test and Protect. For months she has insisted it was working very well even though the virus continued to spread across the country.

“Testing and tracing was supposed to hunt down and drive out the virus before it took root but even more communities this week are facing tighter restrictions."

sked about the error on BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme, Deputy First Minister John Swinney said: “There’s been a coding error with the way in which the results have been entered into the data system, that has now been corrected and the data is being represented.

“But I think what is important is that we focus on the fact that the World Health Organisation states that at least 80% of new cases must have their close contacts traced and in quarantine within 72 hours of case confirmation.

“If you take last week, for example, 97.1% of all contact tracing of all positive cases was completed within 72 hours.

“So on the international standard that we work to we were far in advance of that performance.

“But unfortunately there was a coding error which has been discovered in routine checking by Public Health Scotland and that has now been rectified.”

He added: “We actually have a very effective contact tracing system in Scotland, there has been a coding error in the early stages of the gathering of that information but fundamentally the performance is really good and really sound.”

Public Health Scotland said the coding error has not affected any strategic or operational decision-making on the contact tracing programme.