15,841 positive cases missed

did we nationalise Serco?

 

Unconfirmed rumours (from the Daily Mail so take with the huge barrel of salt it deserves) that the ‘world beating’ software that is being used is Excel and the cases were missed because the file size got too big and couldn’t update. Excel. Excel is not a database and shouldn’t be anywhere near this.

 

And anyone else that has had fun over the past few months.

I was in a pub over the weekend and i saw someone being threatened with being thrown out for talking to someone on a different table - what a miserable joyless world this has created.

 

Not just excel but an out dated version due to government I.T being so basic. I don't know for sure but I'm guessing it was from Office 2010, just from experience.

What an absolute joke, we all know excel shouldn't be used for such operations but the security of the data is also a HUGE issue.

I thought Boris' f*ck buddy Jennifer Accuri had sorted him out with I.T? Or was the money given to her for other services?

 

All political parties are useless. I don't have faith in any of them.

 

NHS England not the government

 

Another Tory apologists line, ‘They’re all the same’

 

You can blame Serco all you want. And although they are not without fault the end user should be bearing the largest brunt of this.

Regardless of the format used to send the data it would appear whichever set of bellends received it didnt undertake any basic checks.

Checking for data completeness is a basic skill that would have picked this **** up at the time especially as it seems at least one file sent was blank!

I would love to see who decided that XL was the way to go as well. Who signed off on that. Handycock? PHE. NHS england. All three?

Given its cost 12 BILLION so far I assume that between the various bodies of incompetence they could have found a couple of half decent SQL or Python developers to have built something that doesnt rely on a spreadsheet being sent via Sftp.

From testing everything that moves for Covid right the way through to the Stasi walking the town centre fining people for being in a group more than six the entire thing is a joke.

Its all planned out on whim. Without any account or scrutiny.

You only have to see the regional interviews from Bojo and Handcock getting his arse handed to him by MPs from all parties regarding the curfew and mask in pubs ********.

And **** all will change until this 'vaccine' turns up...

 

It's just depressing as hell isn't it. Went to meadowhall briefly on Saturday and I won't be going again.

 

Here we go again. But Corbyn...

 

Personally I think sitting and looking at numbers to this extent does little good. Taking a few points and extrapolating a trend.
I also think scientists have over estimated the restrictions ability in the real world to influence the transmission of covid - all that has happened are more rules which are causing now increasing harm with little benefit.
We see now places that have had local lockdowns in place for weeks and weeks with cases still rising.
If cases go down, it's the government's bold action. If they don't, it's our fault for not complying and the restrictions weren't severe enough.

Government can't lose, but meanwhile the virus just does its thing.

 

I blame Serco because it is Serco track and trace and has nothing to do with the NHS. It won’t even allow you to enter NHS tests into the app. It’s what you get when you employ your mate Dildo Harding to do things as a backhander trather than running a proper procurement exercise.

 

See, no good comes from spreadsheets!

 

Did you mean to add an L in her first name..... or is predictive text getting carried away again? ;-)

 

And we've paid £billions up front for millions of vaccines that only those over 50 can have.

 

definitely on purpose as in as much use as a marzipan dildo (Harding)

 

So it looks like they were using Excel to do a databases job. Not only that but an old version which limits the number of rows you can use. Once the 65k or so were reached it was cutting them off.

However Excel does warn you if this happens, so either someone ignored it or they were running a macro to automatically do update incoming files, which means nobody was checking the data as all it would have taken would be for someone to search the last entry in the updated file to realise that it, and the 12k above it were missing.

I have regularly told people at my work we shouldn't be using Excel as it wasn't built to do what's been asked of it, but the thought of doing that for millions of rows of vital health data boggles the mind.

Their work around is apparently to split the file up into several sheets worth of data. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

Another case of underfunding I expect. Might even be they used old excel because legacy systems don't support the new one....

On the upside at least my day with Excel wasn't as bad as someone else's. The horror when discovering that must have an open window away from ending it all.

 

You've hit the nail on the head, the civil service for over a decade had its I.T projects cut or outsourced to such a degree that new systems are only delivered in part due to costs. Systems are then either obsolete on delivery or not fit for purpose. Excel courses are handed out like they're the silver bullet. Excel superusers are lauded over. You'll see many job specifications which state applicants must have a good working knowledge of excel. The civil service is built on spreadsheets, if a task needs doing it needs its own spreadsheet. I sh*t you not!

 

It's bringing back awful memories from my own career of what The Meaning of Liff calls an Ely:

Ely (n.)
The first, tiniest inkling you get that something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong.

Like when you do something in the dev or test environment and then it dawns on you that you were just looking at something in production a few minutes ago ...