Computer errors can happen anywhere, anytime, even at the British Public Health Office (PHE), which records positive cases of coronavirus. But the situation there is more at the expense of the human factor.

Coronavirus: the second wave

Half a year after the spring outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the second wave of the pandemic has arrived. The radical increase in the number of infected is forcing more and more countries to re-impose restrictions, despite the fact that the world economy has not even recovered from the effects of the spring outbreak. According to the posters, the second wave also reached Hungary. Follow our news!

The British Public Health Service (PHE) ignored a total of almost 16,000 positive coronavirus cases due to an Excel-related dollar, which was therefore not included in official statistics. The experts did not examine infected people outside the filter or their contact.

On explaining the embarrassing case, a BBC gave news. The reason for this phenomenon is that the PHE developers chose the older file format of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program, XLS, which was launched in 1987. This format has been popular for a long time, but has been superseded. by Microsoft in 2007: The default file format for Excel has been XLSX for 13 years. The advantage of the latter is that it can contain more than a million lines of data, whereas an XLS file only has 65,000 lines. (The latter is abundant in daily use, but for a national statistic it no longer counts for much.)

Roughly 1,400 patients can be logged into one of those Excel spreadsheets. (There are several data sets in each case). The problem was that when the British logging software could no longer create multiple fields in the file (downsized due to the XLS format), it simply prepared the job, without even capturing much data.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has defended himself saying that PHE uses an old “legacy” system, and those responsible decided to update it just two months ago. The lost cases were finally added to the national statistics at the end of the week.

Critics of the British government say the ball is extremely severe. According to Professor Jon Crowcroft of the University of Cambridge, not even a high school computer science student would make such a mistake.

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