Public Health England declared on Sunday the bureau has under-reported COVID-19 diseases by 15,841 instances lately because of some”technical matter.”
PHE did not explain the essence of the technical problem, but several British news resources also consumed pointed the finger in Microsoft Excel. Here is how the Guardian explains the problem:
PHE was in charge of collating the evaluation results from private and public labs, and releasing the daily updates on the event count and evaluations performed.
In cases like this, the Guardian knows, 1 laboratory had delivered its everyday evaluation report on PHE in the kind of a CSV record — the easiest possible database structure, only a set of values separated by commas. This report was subsequently packed in to Microsoft Excel, along with the newest tests in the base have been added to the primary database.
However, while CSV files may be virtually almost any dimension, Microsoft Excel documents can only be 1,048,576 inches. After a CSV file more than that’s started, the base rows become cut off and therefore so are no more displayed. That implies that, when the laboratory had completed over a million evaluations, it was simply a matter of time until its reports didn’t be read by PHE.
The bureau states it’ll take precautions to be certain a mistake like this will not occur later on.
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