(UK) Covid: 16,000 coronavirus cases missed in daily figures after IT error

[muriel_volestrangler]

Nearly 16,000 cases of coronavirus were not entered into the national computer system used for official figures because of a technical glitch, Public Health England says.

Some of the unreported cases were added to Saturday's figure of 12,872 new cases and Sunday's figure of 22,961.

It said all of the cases "received their Covid-19 test result as normal".

But BBC Health Editor Hugh Pym said it meant the contacts of those who tested positive had not been approached.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54412581

15,841 cases between 25 September and 2 October. That's a lot of missed contacts, for most of whom it's now too late to stop them spreading it. Could be dozens, or even hundreds, of deaths because of it.

[The King of Prussia]

1. Yeah but

made everyone think for a couple of days that the workshy moron's "Rule of 6" was working.

I look at the case numbers for Bradford. Positive tests have been added on Sunday as far back as late August. On Saturday, the positive test total for 20th September increased by nearly 10%. 25th September is a red herring.

[T_i_B]

2. There's a lot of blame flying around at the moment

Truth be told, I think that people not respecting the rules, weak leadership from Westminster politicians and anti lockdown gobshites like Peter Hitchens and Piers Corbyn all have to take some of the responsibility.

The second wave is happening, and I fully expect full lockdown to return before too long. Winter conditions alone, with people not ventilating their homes as much will play a major part in things here.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Excel: Why using Microsoft's tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost

The issue was caused by the way the agency brought together logs produced by commercial firms paid to analyse swab tests of the public, to discover who has the virus.

They filed their results in the form of text-based lists - known as CSV files - without issue.
...
The problem is that PHE's own developers picked an old file format to do this - known as XLS.

As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988