Woman ‘Incredibly Disturbed’ to Find ‘Hundreds’ of COVID Test Samples in FedEx Package
‘SCARED, SHOCKED’
A package allegedly containing hundreds of COVID-19 test samples was mistakenly shipped by FedEx from a city in Massachusetts to a woman’s doorstep in Hawaii over the weekend. Meagan Melum, a mother to three small children, told The Boston Globe she was “incredibly disturbed, scared, shocked” to open the box and find “hundreds of biohazard bags.” Melum, 38, said she “screamed” for her husband and ran outside with the package, which contained vials labelled with testers’ full names, birthdates, and Social Security numbers. Calling the delivery service, “we got passed around on the phone from FedEx customer service for over an hour,” she said. FedEx eventually called Melum back on Monday, picking up the package the same day, she said. A Tuesday statement from the company called the entire incident “completely unacceptable.” The samples allegedly originated with LabElite, a company with a processing lab in Chicago, where the package was supposed to have been delivered. “We’ve been fine all throughout this pandemic,” a company official told the Globe. “And then this one time I guess it got misplaced.”