Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[two sheds]

Pah I use Excel and it's great - I do my accounts and have my to-do list on there. Nothing wrong with it once you get used to using equations.

 

[Chilli.s]

That's quite alarming.

 

[existentialist]

They weren’t using columns for the records were they....? Surely not.

Yes, apparently. And it all fell over at 2^14

 

[existentialist]

Pah I use Excel and it's great - I do my accounts and have my to-do list on there. Nothing wrong with it once you get used to using equations.

There's a big difference between one person updating a spreadsheet in place using non-critical and re-generable information, and using them as a bulk data transfer format. TBH, comma-separated files would have been a better bet.

And not storing records in columns, obviously

 

[two sheds]

and I just looked up TBH thinking it was a database name

 

[Artaxerxes]

Pah I use Excel and it's great - I do my accounts and have my to-do list on there. Nothing wrong with it once you get used to using equations.

Spreadsheets are great.

Spreadsheets aren’t suitable for tracking a million records of tests, people and locations for a deadly flu.

 

[elbows]

Errors have shown up before too. I remember back in the daily press conference days there was a period where they had a particular graph and for one days figures they got the Scottish and Welsh numbers the wrong way round and nobody seemed to notice, despite the way the lines crossed over eachother and then back on the graph.

 

[Mation]

Yes, apparently.

Christ. Fucking clowns.

 

[brogdale]

Christ. Fucking clowns.

Makes (neoliberal) sense tbf...the lowest cost option...the only possible downside/negative externality being the increased deaths accruing from the 50k missed tracings.

 

[two sheds]

Spreadsheets are great.

Spreadsheets aren’t suitable for tracking a million records of tests, people and locations for a deadly flu.

I know Before I transferred my accounts to Excel (actually LibreOffice Calc) I used dBase 3 they could have used that.

What's the problem with storing in columns specifically by the way? Apart from cutting off loads of data - is it just that there were too many columns?

 

[MrSki]

Yes

Worksheet and workbook specifications and limits

Feature	Maximum limit
Total number of rows and columns on a worksheet	1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns
Column width	255 characters
Row height	409 points
Page breaks	1,026 horizontal and vertical

32 more rows

 

[two sheds]

ahhh ta

I don't have quite that many in my accounts

 

[editor]

Good luck policing this proposal:

The Welsh Government is considering imposing quarantine periods on people travelling from other parts of the UK.

Unlike in Wales, where people in areas in local lockdown are banned from leaving the county without a reasonable excuse, in England there are no such restrictions.

This means that people in the city of Manchester, which in a local lockdown and had 495 cases per 100,000 people in the last week, are able to travel to Ceredigion or Pembrokeshire on holiday whereas people in Newport, Gwent, which has 50 cases for the same number of people, can not.


First Minister Mark Drakeford last week wrote the Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking him to restrict travel from areas of England in lockdown.

According to health minister Vaughan Gething they have had no response from the Prime Minister to the letter but have assumed, given comments made by Mr Johnson in the Commons and interviews that he will not be imposing these restrictions.

Mr Gething said he was "disappointed" no response had been received but as the Prime Minister was "not minded" to introduce restrictions he was now "actively considering” bringing in travel restrictions to stop people in high prevalence areas in rest of UK travelling into Wales.


He said: "The picture we see in all four nations of the UK is a much higher prevalence [of the virus] with some areas having high concentrations.

"The reason why the Welsh Government has asked the UK Government to introduce travel restrictions to areas of England with high prevalence is because we do know that travel brings with it additional risks.

"We know that if people from Liverpool come and are in the same pub and same environment as other people there is a risk of there being a spreading event."

Wales considers coronavirus quarantines for some visitors from England

People visiting from coronavirus hotspots in England might have to self-isolate for two weeks if they visit Wales

www.walesonline.co.uk

 

[elbows]

I would do that if I were Wales. Effective policing is not required to get some effect out of it, for example a percentage of people will self-police and wont make the journey.

 

[editor]

Curtains for the Gunnersaurus

Arsenal mascot Gunnersaurus becomes latest victim of Covid cuts

The man behind Arsenal mascot Gunnersaurus has been let go by the club as part of their coronavirus cost-cutting process, according to The Athletic.

www.standard.co.uk

 

[fishfinger]

Curtains for the Gunnersaurus

http://[URL='https://www.standard.c...avirus-costcutting-a4563256.html[/URL[/COLOR]

]

Covid killed the dinosaurs

 

[Pickman's model]

Covid killed the dinosaurs

that's nothing, video killed the radio star

 

[Wilf]

I feel like there's so much that they've fucked up over this that there's never one single thing for the public to build up into a head of steam of protest, aside from a general feeling they are idiots. A bit like a lion trying to bring down a wilderbeast amid a broiling herd of the things. It never manages to focus on a single one to the point where it can track it and pounce.

 

[elbows]

I would do that if I were Wales. Effective policing is not required to get some effect out of it, for example a percentage of people will self-police and wont make the journey.

And especially if a quarantine angle is introduced, judging by the coverage of people racing home from abroad we were treated to every weekend for a while.

Covid: Welsh quarantine considered for UK coronavirus hotspots

Quarantine restrictions are considered after the prime minister declined to impose a travel ban.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[brogdale]

Mapping the scale of the government's failure:

to the left - what things looked like with the data missing

to the right - the grim reality

 

[Lurdan]

I feel like there's so much that they've fucked up over this that there's never one single thing for the public to build up into a head of steam of protest, aside from a general feeling they are idiots. A bit like a lion trying to bring down a wilderbeast amid a broiling herd of the things. It never manages to focus on a single one to the point where it can track it and pounce.

Seems a little defeatist to me

Spoiler

 

[editor]

Almost 500 people have tested positive for coronavirus at the University of Sheffield. According to an online tracker on the university’s website, 474 students and five staff members have tested positive for Covid-19 as of September 28. A university spokesperson said: ‘We recognise how difficult it is for students who are new to Sheffield and need to self-isolate because of Covid-19 cases. ‘To make sure we are supporting students in the best way possible, we will contact all students who are self-isolating to check on their welfare and offer practical and emotional support.’ They added those affected by coronavirus were following Government guidelines and that support is available.
Read more: Almost 500 students at Sheffield University test positive for coronavirus

(I like the "I hate my flatmate" sign!)

 

[brogdale]

To my (limited IT knowledge) mind, this explanation seemed pretty good:

Coronavirus: Data can save lives, data can cost lives - and this latest testing blunder will likely prove it

 

[prunus]

To my (limited IT knowledge) mind, this explanation seemed pretty good:

Coronavirus: Data can save lives, data can cost lives - and this latest testing blunder will likely prove it

View attachment 233067

OMFG, and I don't say that very often.

So, the data was coming in to PHE as csv, which is the obvious obvious way to do it. And obviously obviously intended to be loaded into a database.

They weren't using columns as records (I can only assume, as a csv in that format would be too insane to contemplate).

They were 'loading'* the csv into Excel to do the 'work'. They're using the old version of Excel, with a 65,536 row [record] limit. They had no error handling (it seems) to warn them that if the incoming data was more than 65,536 rows it would truncate it, silently discarding the balance.

It was clearly being done in a cargo cult manner 'press this button, then this, then click here, out will come the results' without any intelligent human sense checking, or even basic automated sense checking (number of input records=number of output records perhaps?).

Absolute fucking shit show.

£12,000,000,000.

* I am intrigued by this step, as if I recall correctly if you 'load' a csv with more than 65536 rows into the old excel by double-clicking on it, or using the 'open' dialog, it gives you a (modal, so not ignorable) warning that it's not all loaded, which suggests to me that someone wrote a (vba, for such is the joy of old excel) loading macro with zero error checking... Although thinking about it it's not clear how they did that - usually one would do a line by line loop parsing each line in turn (and checking it looks like what you expect, otherwise throw an error), then writing into a worksheet, but that would throw an error when you tried to write to row 65537; I wonder if someone did a 'record macro' of loading a csv, and turned off the warning flag in the command, I think that was possible... fucking stupid thing to do through. Anyway, I digress.

 

[MrSki]

From today's NYTimes.

 

[miss direct]

But it's never been the law to wear masks while outside, leading to people desperately ripping them off in doorways of shops as though they are gagging to breathe.

 

[MrSki]

But it's never been the law to wear masks while outside, leading to people desperately ripping them off in doorways of shops as though they are gagging to breathe.

It doesn't say that. Just that rules about mask wearing are frequently ignored.

 

[MrSki]

So the rate amongst students in Manchester is 3%.

 

[brogdale]

Faced with questions about the data debacle in the commons, HanCock said that they'd known about this "legacy PHE data" problem since July and that he'd commissioned it's replacement and that was presently being worked on.

Cunt.

 

[MrSki]

Faced with questions about the data debacle in the commons, HanCock said that they'd known about this "legacy PHE data" problem since July and that he'd commissioned it's replacement and that was presently being worked on.

Cunt.

Making sure that anything that goes wrong is associated with PHE (the soon to be scrapped scapegoat) & not Serco or other contractors.