Coronavirus outbreak

[Rezillo]

This is beyond incompetent. It's not even a database. Who on earth set that up?

[edit] Difficult to work out who's at fault here. It seems to be PHE's spreadsheet but they would have been working to a data submission format specified by Baroness Useless's Test and Trace. I know which organisation I would place my money on.

 

[tom73]

The fact that things like cancer and other serious treatments suffered was not just down to staffing levels, but also about organisational decisions and priorities set by top managers and the government. Lots of people with non Covid related illnesses are still suffering from those decisions some 5/6 months after the initial rush.

Yes, the profits of big drug companies are too high.

If the government had got on top this thing when it had a chance hospitals now would not still have be running services. At much reduced capacity due to trying to provide normal day to day services in ways. That allow them to work safely due to a very much active covid wider environment. Some services become too clinically a risk to be able to run at the height of all this. At the time much less was known about covid and the risk to some may well have been over played. But at the time they had to work with what they had. Testing was also now way near good enough to have allow services to run. Even now that's still not fixed mass testing of staff though it was promised months ago is yet to happen. The fact that large about of the health service continued to run is no mean feat given the mess they had to work with.

 

[mjr]

This is beyond incompetent. It's not even a database. Who on earth set that up?

Maybe once the C-suite (Dido ain't cheap), the admin team, the sales department and order processing had all taken their cuts, there was only enough money left in the Track and Trace contract for an intern to develop it unsupervised.

I'm also seeing comments that the Excel data gets sent to an Access database, but the Access database was on a filesystem with a 2Gb file size limit and there was no verification/integrity testing... but as ever on social media, you don't know who knows what officially, who knows and is leaking and who is making shoot up.

 

[tom73]

This is beyond incompetent. It's not even a database. Who on earth set that up?

[edit] Difficult to work out who's at fault here. It seems to be PHE's spreadsheet but they would have been working to a data submission format specified by Baroness Useless's Test and Trace. I know which organisation I would place my money on.

Serco and the other failed French IT provider (forget the name) ? Still don't think it even links to system one yet.

Anyone know if the lost data is pillar one or two ?
Pillar one the only real NHS bit appears to working fine.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Cases dropping here but the surrounding areas are jumping up. Time to erect some walls 😀

 

[Ming the Merciless]

This is beyond incompetent. It's not even a database. Who on earth set that up?

[edit] Difficult to work out who's at fault here. It seems to be PHE's spreadsheet but they would have been working to a data submission format specified by Baroness Useless's Test and Trace. I know which organisation I would place my money on.

A spreadsheet for transferring the central Covid 19 data? Tell me you are joking. What is this, amateur hour? Word beating my arse.

 

[Edwardoka]

It's not Excel's fault that they used it for track and trace. It's the government's fault.
Excel is an excellent tool in the right hands, unfortunately in this case the hands using it belonged to tools.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Knowing the NHS they are probably on an old version of Excel.

Lotus 123 more like

 

[stowie]

This report from the Grunaid is quite illuminating - if correct of course.

Reports for a lab would be sent in a csv format (which is an unlimited basic text format to represent the data)
This gets imported to Excel which has a row limit - so if the csv file overruns it simply ignores the remaining data
Lab sends through CSV with all tests run (not just the latest)
Someone uses excel to manipulate this data in order to plug it into the main COVID database.

As soon as the limit on excel was reached for row numbers then the new tests at the end of the CSV got lost.

 

[Rusty Nails]

If the government had got on top this thing when it had a chance hospitals now would not still have be running services. At much reduced capacity due to trying to provide normal day to day services in ways. That allow them to work safely due to a very much active covid wider environment. Some services become too clinically a risk to be able to run at the height of all this. At the time much less was known about covid and the risk to some may well have been over played. But at the time they had to work with what they had. Testing was also now way near good enough to have allow services to run. Even now that's still not fixed mass testing of staff though it was promised months ago is yet to happen. The fact that large about of the health service continued to run is no mean feat given the mess they had to work with.

I agree that a significant number of the transmission and subsequent mortality statistics were caused by our government's piss-poor response, initially and subsequently.

I just believe that the NHS (excluding the front-line medical staff) is a huge bureaucracy that is not as marvellous as we like to make out.

Did our NHS deal with the virus in a more effective way than other European countries such as Germany, France, Sweden etc.?

The NHS has always been a political football, with little organisational stability, and that has contributed to, rather than resolved, its many problems.

 

[DaveReading]

This report from the Grunaid is quite illuminating - if correct of course.

Reports for a lab would be sent in a csv format (which is an unlimited basic text format to represent the data)
This gets imported to Excel which has a row limit - so if the csv file overruns it simply ignores the remaining data
Lab sends through CSV with all tests run (not just the latest)
Someone uses excel to manipulate this data in order to plug it into the main COVID database.

As soon as the limit on excel was reached for row numbers then the new tests at the end of the CSV got lost.

Suggestions elsewhere that it was the column limit that was reached, as the genius who designed the spreadsheet thought it would be a good idea to have a column for each case, rather than a row.

Hard to believe, if that's true.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

North of 12000 cases today, and apparently not inflated by the Excel fark up.

That's really bad, looks like doubling every 10 days or so still. I think the estimate for the peak of the first wave was 100,000 per day, which translated to 1000 deaths per day. We'll be back there by the end of the month at this rate (three doublings).

[Please, someone tell me I've got this wrong because this seems awfully grim news to me]

 

[roubaixtuesday]

 

[Ming the Merciless]

View attachment 550838

Press return to auto fill the data and import the pandemic data twice if you’d like the number of daily cases to double...

 

[tom73]

Investigation being set up to find out why it’s looking like the government only want one. As they are already looking at pinning the blame yet again on PHE. Funny how this cock up is getting investigated we have plenty of others to pick from. Compared to Australia and New Zealand they’ve had 4 in total already
but then they’ve only had that many cocks up.