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Public Health England admitted Sunday that the company had underestimated COVID-19 infections in 15,841 cases in recent days due to a “technical problem. “The missing tests were conducted between 25 September and 2 October and have since been added to national statistics, the firm said.
PHE did not identify the nature of the technical problem, however, several British news resources pointed the finger at Microsoft Excel. Here’s how The Guardian describes the problem:
PHE guilty of collecting the effects of public and personal laboratory testing, and for publishing daily updates on the number of instances and tests performed.
The firm says it will take precautions so that an error like this doesn’t happen in the future.
In addition to underestimating the number of COVID cases in official statistics, the challenge has also hampered touch tracking efforts, as knowledge of the lack of positive controls has been passed on to touch plotters. Officials noted that the control persons themselves received their control effects normally.
The UK has been in the midst of a wave of coronavirus infections lately. Infections in the country peaked in April and then fell to a few hundred a day in July. But cases have soared in the last month, and in recent days the UK has reported more than 10,000 new cases per day (even in cases beyond missing). That’s almost as much as the United States consistent with capital.
Update (1:25 p. m. ): The BBC gives another Excel-like explanation for the error:
PHE had established an automatic procedure to collect this knowledge in Excel models so that it can then be downloaded to a central formula and can be had on the NHS testing and tracking team, as well as on other government computer panels.
The problem is that PHE developers have selected an old record format to do this, called XLS.
As a result, each style can handle only about 65,000 lines of knowledge instead of the more than one million lines that Excel is able to make.
And because each result of a check created lines of data, this meant in practice that each style was limited to about 1400 instances. When this overall result was dreamy, other instances were simply discarded.
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