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Coronavirus - the new strain XI

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mandryka said:
Here we are in the middle of the biggest crisis for generations and all some people are able to do is complain about who got the contracts.
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But that's key to the whole mess! Your line is equivalent to saying that we shouldn't bother about who was awarded the contract to refurbish Grenfell Tower. If contracts are awarded to know-nothing shysters, especially in the area of public health lots more people will die than if the work had been given to organisations with a better understanding of the task.
 
Seanm said:
Thread on why we might want to delay panicking, a bit:

https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1312864040583077892?s=21
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The green line on that graph extrapolated back to the beginning of the month is the important one because it covers many more data points - the red curve is fantasy island stuff. Actually the graph is statistically as straight as an arrow (I've plotted the numbers below). The hospitalisations have been increasing steadily by between 8.9 and 10.6 per day throughout September, at the 95% confidence level, there's no sign of curvature one way or the other yet. When the values of x (i.e. days) are small compared to the 'doubling time', the exponential function can be approximated by a straight line, and the concept of a doubling time is meaningless.



The case numbers are what they are (or not) - it's the hospitalisation figures that really matter, and the deaths of course, but that number's a bit small still to track.
 
On the basis that about 75% are asymptomatic we have had at least 12,000 positive Covid people un-notified that they are positive and so running around as normal infecting x,000 more people.
It is either an attempt to speed up herd immunity or the UK is officially a third world country. In fact some third world countries are doing better than the UK.
 
wacko said:
On the basis that about 75% are asymptomatic we have had at least 12,000 positive Covid people un-notified that they are positive and so running around as normal infecting x,000 more people.
It is either an attempt to speed up herd immunity or the UK is officially a third world country. In fact some third world countries are doing better than the UK.
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I think they were notified, but the results simply didn't register on the daily figures. So, if notified positive, they should have self-isolated anyway. The issue is partly around the stats, but also that the 'trace' bit of test and trace couldn't kick in, so their contacts may have gone on to become infected, and infect others, which was avoidable.
 
claire.foxx said:
JFC there are entire companies who stress test mission critical spreadsheets, a lot of descisions rely on spreadsheet and a standard part of due diligence to pass all code to such specialists to ensure they don’t fall over or work in unintended ways.

This government doesn’t attempt due diligence.
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That's because the word 'diligence' doesn't appear in their dictionary. It skips straight from ‘dilatory’ to ‘disgrace’. Some more comprehensive tomes also include ‘disaster’.
 
Using MS Office tools for anything like that is a mistake anyway.

If only the Civil Service hadn't sacked off most of its developers, it wouldn't have to rely on 'gifted amateurs' who know a bit about VBA to develop important tools like that.
 
Seeker_UK said:
Using MS Office tools for anything like that is a mistake anyway.

If only the Civil Service hadn't sacked off most of its developers, it wouldn't have to rely on 'gifted amateurs' who know a bit about VBA to develop important tools like that.
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Yup, as a former IT guy (business analysis) just reading about it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Staggering incompetence at the heart of government during an existential crisis.
 
And this is why you design mission critical infrastructure around enterprise-level databases.

y5z2cpes
 
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Caledon1297 said:
"The issue occurred when people who tested positive were not recorded once a master Excel spreadsheet reached its maximum size."
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So, let’s just allow this to sink in; the UK Conservative Government has spent in the region of £10bn so far on a high-profile and absolutely mission-critical ‘track and trace’ system (much of it apparently going to Dominic Cummings mates and party donors). One that apparently pushes Microsoft Excel to its limits. Seriously, WTAF?
 
Caledon1297 said:
Covid-19 cases soar in dozens of areas of England following spreadsheet error

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/ukne...wing-spreadsheet-error/ar-BB19HT6W?li=AAnZ9Ug

"The issue occurred when people who tested positive were not recorded once a master Excel spreadsheet reached its maximum size."
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When I worked on Climate Science, we were using an Excel spreadsheet filled with collated data.

We were surprised to find one morning, that all our lovely graphs that clearly proved Nigel Lawson was a ^&^%, now pretty much had no statistical significance whatsoever.

Turns out that Excel had been updated overnight with a bug fix to several of its mathematical tools.

So, SERCO Track and Trace and Deloitte Testing. It's just one of Cummings' 'weirdoes' entering data in Excel 2.5 in a dark room surrounded by Pizza and Red Bull, isn't it?

NHS check in didn't work at all for me this weekend even with NHS QR codes.

And I still can't enter test results!

Stephen
 
Mother got admitted to local Icu yesterday confirmed covid, responding well to treatment aged 75 been ill at home for two weeks.
 
droodzilla said:
Yup, as a former IT guy (business analysis) just reading about it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Staggering incompetence at the heart of government during an existential crisis.
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Well, this is the definition of 'govern':

"conduct the policy, actions, and affairs of (a state, organization, or people) with authority."

I think there's a case to be said that they're not actually governing. I think it's time we had one that can.
 
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