Within FASTQFileHandler, os.popen calls awk print to dump the contents of the minimap2 report file. To find match_alert_header, num_match, and tot_len (of which later two are used in presence threshold calculations) are found within the awk pipe via magic indexing. If awk was ever to fail or produce something unexpected, the indexing would fail, causing MICAS to fail to notify the end user of a threshold being reached.
This could be fixed via some form of named indexing or error handling.