10-06-2020, 10:29 AM
(10-06-2020, 09:35 AM)Protheroe Wrote: Ahem.
"And it appears that Public Health England (PHE) was to blame, rather than a third-party contractor."
PHE are responsible for reporting the information to Serco it appears that the problem was one of the labs that are both in public and private hands sent the information as CSV files and that killed the inappropriate/ archaic / crap Excel format as it simply ran out of space to report and became truncated.
“PHE was responsible for collating the test results from public and private labs, and publishing the daily updates on case count and tests performed.
But the rapid development of the testing programme has meant that much of the work is still done manually, with individual labs sending PHE spreadsheets containing their results. Although the system has improved from the early days of the pandemic, when some of the work was performed with phone calls, pens and paper, it is still far from automated.
In this case, the Guardian understands, one lab had sent its daily test report to PHE in the form of a CSV file – the simplest possible database format, just a list of values separated by commas. That report was then loaded into Microsoft Excel, and the new tests at the bottom were added to the main database.“
So the system falls down because it’s a fragmented mess between the labs, under funded Public Health and Serco. Ultimately the system is ran by Dido Harding on behalf of the government. Gifting contracts to outsourcing companies helps who exactly?