United Kingdom VI: Summer Lovin'

[Neon Ignition]

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

Backdated figures are rolled in again to give us the *spit out tea* 22,961 tally for today

Take the two days figures which the site states as being 15,841 overhead on the normal figures and divide by the window the figures represent being backdated from and it gives an average 2,263 which means that the real daily tally for the last week has more realistically been 9-10,000 per day compared to 7,000 the week before.

[Dogg Thang]

I love the blue excuse box you guys have on your figures.

[QualityChimp]

I didnt feel threatened at all watching Tenet. Saying that, there were 10 people in a superscreen. No way was that showing profitable.

Going to Tesco is way riskier imo.

And I do get my food delivered mostly. Bottom line is - I’m not taking any needless risks and going to a cinema, for me, would be a stupid way to catch covid and in no way worth it.

I think you're both on the same page, but it was the same for me.
I saw Tenet with a couple of friends. Seating was every-other row and 2 seat spacing.
All irrelevant, because there was literally one other person in the whole screen!
I felt safe, had an amazing experience - who doesn't like having the cinema to them selves?

Obviously, this setup is untenable and the cinema is going to make a massive loss just opening up.

Blaming the cinema chains for closing or the big movie studios from releasing their big films (Bond's pushback is being blamed) seems ridiculous to me.

[Neon Ignition]

Guy livid on the radio earlier because his daughter had the positive outcome notification sent to her a full 13 days late meaning she's been working with vulnerable adults throughout her infection. He was particularly livid because it showed the Government was lying about how far back the issue dates to as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/05/england-covid-cases-error-unknown-how-many-contacts-not-traced-says-minister

Up to 50,000 might not have been traced at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/oct/05/uk-coronavirus-live-news-covid-19-latest-updates-vaccine-testing-trace-lockdown

A thinktank says the often ignored Long Covid could be the bigger threat

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2020/oct/05/cineworld-cinema-closures-uk-us-car-sales-donald-trump-stock-markets-business-lvie

Cineworld has confirmed plans to temporarily shut its cinemas slicing 50% off its shares and costing 45,000 jobs. Odeon has also confirmed it will close a quarter of its cinemas during Monday-Fridays. BECTA, that represents the entertainment industry, has levied all the blame on studios saying it's their fault for not continuing to release their major movies regardless of the public health concerns or lack of sufficient audience numbers. Johnson meanwhile recommends people run on down there and go watch some films.

[Dogg Thang]

Guy livid on the radio earlier because his daughter had the positive outcome notification sent to her a full 13 days late meaning she's been working with vulnerable adults throughout her infection. He was particularly livid because it showed the Government was lying about how far back the issue dates to as well.

13 days is crazy. When my wife got tested, she got the results within 24 hours. But... if there was any reason to suspect this person might have covid, shouldn't she have been isolating during this time? Or was it some routine test where she had no reason to think she had it?

[QualityChimp]

It's rumoured that the reason why so many positive Coronavirus tests were missed is because all the data is on an Excel spreadsheet and they ran out of columns.

(Daily Mail, so /pinchofsalt)

Embedded Tweet

What's also interesting is that Public Health England (PHE) is being blamed by Government minsters as making this mistake, but PHE are a bit fed up with being the verbal punchbag for every error.
"This is a problem with Test & Trace, a separate bit of the Coronavirus response infrastructure and of course, this is the part headed by Dido Harding, Tory Peer Baroness Harding, she will go on to head the body that is replacing PHE, so I think throughout this pandemic, PHE in the eyes of many has been something of a punchbag that are made, I think that many people are wondering if this is what's happened now."

Embedded Tweet

I'll put money on Government ministers using this mistake as a reason for getting rid of PHE for the National Institute of Health Protection, when it's not PHE at fault, it's the department that's soon to be the NIoHP.

[Lebowski]

Guy livid on the radio earlier because his daughter had the positive outcome notification sent to her a full 13 days late meaning she's been working with vulnerable adults throughout her infection. He was particularly livid because it showed the Government was lying about how far back the issue dates to as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/05/england-covid-cases-error-unknown-how-many-contacts-not-traced-says-minister

Up to 50,000 might not have been traced at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/oct/05/uk-coronavirus-live-news-covid-19-latest-updates-vaccine-testing-trace-lockdown

A thinktank says the often ignored Long Covid could be the bigger threat

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2020/oct/05/cineworld-cinema-closures-uk-us-car-sales-donald-trump-stock-markets-business-lvie

Cineworld has confirmed plans to temporarily shut its cinemas slicing 50% off its shares and costing 45,000 jobs. Odeon has also confirmed it will close a quarter of its cinemas during Monday-Fridays. BECTA, that represents the entertainment industry, has levied all the blame on studios saying it's their fault for not continuing to release their major movies regardless of the public health concerns or lack of sufficient audience numbers. Johnson meanwhile recommends people run on down there and go watch some films.

You cant put an industry on pause for a year and expect it to not have any shutdowns or layoffs, black widow and James Bond where both supposed to be out in April and be big summer blockbusters, so not only has the cinema industry lost its summer its loosing its winter too with things not looking to pick up till Feb next year.

[MartyG]

It's rumoured that the reason why so many positive Coronavirus tests were missed is because all the data is on an Excel spreadsheet and they ran out of columns.

Depends how they were using Excel I suppose. Excel use if very very common in government and local councils as an input and output data format. Excel can handle a million rows of data, but it can also handle far more than that via pivot table to actual databases and other data sources (like other spreadsheets)

Excel is not a bad platform per se for this (for example the data is entered in excel and imported centrally from it), it just depends on the use case and sheet design.

[QualityChimp]

Depends how they were using Excel I suppose.

Wrongly?

No pivot tables and too many columns.

Is it wrong to think that a £10 billion track and trace system could stretch to a copy of Access, or even a bespoke database?

[Dogg Thang]

I don't know how trustworthy any of the Excel info is but word down the twitter pub is that they reckoned the Excel part happened in transferring info from some place to some other place and isn't where the numbers are worked out but it was in the transferring that the error happened. No idea where people are getting this info from though.

[MartyG]

Wrongly?

No pivot tables and too many columns.

Is it wrong to think that a £10 billion track and trace system could stretch to a copy of Access, or even a bespoke database?

How do you know it doesn't?

I'd take anything the Daily Mail is printing with a dumper truck load of salt. What I can tell you is for data transfer, it's very common for Excel Spreadsheets to be used based on the work I've done with different government agencies and councils over the last 11 years which then gets imported into other systems, often Power BI for the reporting. Currently trying to move people across to REST APIs so the the data can import directly to Power PI to skip the Excel step. But they do love Excel (and IE11, which can cause a lot of problem itself. It wasn't that long ago we were still having to support IE9 for them).

[Cassius_Smoke]

A SQL database would have been better for this. You could even hook it up with power automate to feed data in from anything. Then it can be as big as you like and as flexible.

[QualityChimp]

How do you know it doesn't?

Because they've monumentally ****ed up the figures?

I did specify from the start, I've not taken it as gospel considering the source, but I've also said before how it's interesting how perfectly believable that using Excel wrongly could genuinely be the reason.

I've also said I try to look beyond the obvious headlines. So whilst everyone is laughing and making memes about Excel, what are we missing?

[Dogg Thang]

what are we missing?

Only the fact that the numbers themselves are stupidly high regardless of Excel or any other means of logging them.

Over here, we've also had stupidly high numbers. Yesterday our health body in charge of monitoring this recommended to the government to implement the highest level of restrictions across the entire country in order to get it under control again. Today for the first time since this started, our government have gone against the advice of the scientists and medical experts and are, instead, upping the restrictions by merely a token (enough that there wouldn't be a single change to my life or the lives of most others). I feel like we're in the midst of the second act of this movie now and going past the point of no return.

It might not have a happy ending.

[MartyG]

Because they've monumentally ****ed up the figures?

I did specify from the start, I've not taken it as gospel considering the source, but I've also said before how it's interesting how perfectly believable that using Excel wrongly could genuinely be the reason.

I've also said I try to look beyond the obvious headlines. So whilst everyone is laughing and making memes about Excel, what are we missing?

There could be hundreds of different reasons other than a spreadsheet not having enough columns for that. I very strongly doubt that a spreadsheet is the main data source - as an intermediatry I can believe it because, as I said above, it's a format used a lot for interportability around reporting. What I think is very plausable is the data export exceeded Excel limits and so the numbers in reporting aren't accurate - and it probably tested absolutely fine given it's only recently become an issue.

Now you might say if that's the case they should have tested it better - but edge cases like that can be very tricky to anticipate - what's important is they realised the error, admitted there was one and have corrected for it. I'd be more concerned if this story came out and only then did they admit there was an issue, adjusting the numbers because they were forced to after trying to hide the problem.

I think DT is right, that we should probably be more concerned at how high the figures have become.