People who couldn’t pass TransUnion’s particular credit checks were refused tests, including many who had bank accounts and were on the electoral roll, and so should have been entirely verifiable as being real people. Identity verification was outsourced to the credit agency TransUnion-which implemented it by running credit checks. But outsourcing is fraught with hazards of exactly this kind, where faulty systems are created to get around regulatory problems or cut cornersĪ shortage of home testing kits led to the government worrying that people would request multiple kits. government has used wide-ranging outsourcing to the private sector to build a COVID-19 response system quickly. Right now, Public Health England has worked around the present problem: Serco Test and Trace still takes an Excel 2003-formatted XLS spreadsheet as part of the data pipeline-but the process now uses multiple sheets, so the files don’t overflow again. PHE had to put in place technological duct tape to make a system of life-or-death importance work at all. The data was then put into this system-the single system that serves as the bridge between testing and tracing, for all of England. Since a test-and-trace system is not possible without this data, PHE set up feeds for the data anyway, as CSV text files directly from the testing labs. The process that went wrong was a workaround for a contract issue: The government’s contract with Deloitte to run the testing explicitly stipulated that the company did not have to report “Pillar 2” (general public testing) positive cases to PHE at all. But the question to ask when a procedure leads to disaster is: What problem was the procedure supposed to solve in the first place? PHE’s process was broken in multiple ways why did it exist at all? PHE was initially blamed for the data disaster. was, as of May, still based on data handwritten on cards. It’s not clear if the software at PHE was an Excel spreadsheet or an in-house program using the XLS format for data interchange-the latter would explain why PHE stated that replacing it might take months-but the XLS format would have been used on the assumption that Excel was universal.Īnd even then, a system based on Excel-format files would have been an improvement over earlier systems-the system for keeping a count of COVID-19 cases in the U.K. The data was corrected the next day, and PHE announced the issue the day after. 2 that not all data that had been sent in was making it out the other end. Technicians at PHE monitoring the dashboards noticed on Oct. With several lines of data per patient, this meant a sheet could only hold 1,400 cases. Unfortunately, the process produced XLS files-an outdated Excel format that went extinct in 2003-which had a limit of 65,536 rows, rather than the around 1 million-row limit in the more recent XLSX format. An automated process at Public Health England (PHE) transformed the incoming private laboratory test data (which was in text-based CSV files) into Excel-format files, to pass to the Serco Test and Trace teams’ dashboards. So almost every business has at least one critical process that relies on a years-old spreadsheet set up by past staff members that nobody left at the company understands. A spreadsheet is good for quickly modeling a problem-but too often, organizations cut corners and press the cardboard-and-string mock-up into production, instead of building a robust and unique system based on the Excel proof of concept.Įxcel is almost universally misused for complex data processing, as in this case-because it’s already present on your work computer and you don’t have to spend months procuring new software. So how did they get here?Įxcel is a top-of-the-line spreadsheet tool. The U.K.’s response to COVID-19 is widely regarded as scattershot and haphazard. The cause was simple: a mistake between different formats of Excel files. 3, and the cases were not added to official totals until Oct. Patients were told they had tested positive, but their details weren’t passed to contact tracers until 1 a.m. 2, with 48,000 of their possible contacts not warned-because of errors in a data import. government’s coronavirus tracing program, in the week from Sept. In the United Kingdom, 15,841 people with coronavirus infections went unreported to Serco Test and Trace, the company running the U.K. The people with the coronavirus know they have it, but their contacts don’t know. You’ve just discovered that nearly 16,000 positive tests didn’t get into the system for a week. Imagine that you’re working in a government subdepartment that tracks coronavirus infections and traces the patients’ contacts.
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