6th October 2020 - Track and Trace Technology, and a little rest

Thought for the day:"Do electricians talk about Current events?"

LINK JOHNS HOPKINS

Office of National Statistics

Said I would get it..
Spitting Image 

(Seems to have been removed already - pity)

In other entertainments...
a bit of light dance for another day ..

This popped up on my feed today - I had forgotten ...

From Bob Edwards - 6th October 2014

Spreading the divine message.

During the afternoon break at the New Brighton Jake Thackray event, a lady of indeterminate age, upon finding out that I was Welsh, asked if I were a Bard. I replied that I wasn't, but I knew of a Bard who owned a tavern called the Crimson Moon which was occasionally infested with Goblins. Etc.

Shortly after, the lady's friend, also of indeterminate age told me that the words of the song were wrong, and were actually "there's a pink one etc". Amazingly, one of my colleagues butted in and said "There are no pink goblins!"

My missionary work has been done successfully.

So, on the day that we discover the truth about the Track and Trace system, that is failed because they decided to use an old version of an excel spreadsheet to gather the data, a version that only allowed a fixed number of columns / rows ...

"The 15,841 “missing” cases made public today were originally recorded between September 25th and October 2nd. All those who tested positive for COVID-19 were notified by the UK’s health authorities, but the failure to upload these cases to the national database meant anyone who came into contact with these individuals was not informed. It’s an error that may have helped spread the virus further through the country as individuals exposed to the virus continued to act as normal.

According to reports from The Guardian and Sky News, the mistake was caused when PHE tried to collate data from multiple sources in the form of CSV files by loading them into Excel. This popular spreadsheet software has limits in how many rows it can load — 65,536 rows in older versions and 1,048,576 rows in more recent versions. Based on these reports, it’s not clear which version of Excel PHE is using, but the row-limit was reached regardless. As PHE workers tried to load more cases into the national database, they were rejected.

The solution, at least, is as simple as the error, and the overly large files have reportedly now been split into smaller batches. PHE didn’t confirm this but says the problem is now resolved, and that it passed the details of the backlog of confirmed cases onto the UK’s contact tracers as of 1PM local time on Saturday."

It is still unconfirmed whether they were actually using columns for cases rather than rows - which even my domestic use of excel would seem to be an error. a world beating system it was meant to be - and has cost millions...

***BREAKING*** Serco promise to source new supply of blank cassettes, to solve the data loss problem on their state of the art test and trace system!

Luckily - there is a new rules generator for Covid.. You are welcome

We are both having a bit of a down day today. I have twisted my back - it may have been, splitting the wood, laying the plastic in the mechanical shed, bringing up pieces of the chicken run or old age. Susie had another flutter but sadly her doctor is away for a month and the replacement "phone consultation" is not until next Tuesday. Seems to know her for six for a couple of days so she is taking it easy.

It is raining out there so having a day on the computer and watching Youtube mash-ups like the one at the start of this blog. Better than other television I reckon.

And so - Cheers!