//...no we arent expecting lady Dido to re write software code//
It seems no "software code" was necessary:
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The BBC has confirmed the missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Microsoft's Excel software. Furthermore, Public Health England (PHE) was to blame, rather than a third-party contractor.
The issue was caused by the way the agency brought together logs produced by the commercial firms paid to carry out swab tests for the virus.
They filed their results in the form of text-based lists, without issue.
PHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system and made available to the NHS Test and Trace team as well as other government computer dashboards.
The problem is that the PHE 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.
And since each test result created several rows of data, in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases. When that total was reached, further cases were simply left off.
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So let me get this straight. PHE (and its successor since 18th August) has been handling the data on new infections. This data is used to determine wide ranging restrictions and limitations on businesses and people's lives, the severity of which are unparalleled in peace time and some even unheard of in wartime. In order to process this data the scribes have been using MS-Excel (which I have used extensively at work and which I use at home to track my finances and gas bills). Bad enough. But not only the that, the "developers" (almost certainly glorified, or maybe unglorified Macro writers and in that respect I have probably done more "developing" with Excel than they have) were not even aware, or at least did not pay heed, to the capacity limitations of the version and file formats they were using.
We are being led to economic oblivion and to non-Covid health catastrophes based on the results produced by these clowns. (No, "clowns" is not fair - clowns set out to make you laugh and they generally succeed). And we are supposed to follow the advice of a government that cannot properly oversee the simple counting of numbers.