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1.媒體來源:
英國衛報

2.記者署名:
Alex Hern

3.完整新聞標題:
How Excel may have caused loss of 16,000 Covid tests in England

4.完整新聞內文:
Public Health England data error blamed on limitations of Microsoft
spreadsheet
英國公衛資料缺漏錯誤歸咎於微軟試算表長度限制


A million-row limit on Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software may have led
to Public Health England misplacing nearly 16,000 Covid test results, it is
understood.

The data error, which led to 15,841 positive tests being left off the
official daily figures, means than 50,000 potentially infectious people may
have been missed by contact tracers and not told to self-isolate.

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.

But while CSV files can be any size, Microsoft Excel files can only be
1,048,576 rows long – or, in older versions which PHE may have still been
using, a mere 65,536. When a CSV file longer than that is opened, the bottom
rows get cut off and are no longer displayed. That means that, once the lab
had performed more than a million tests, it was only a matter of time before
its reports failed to be read by PHE.

Microsoft’s spreadsheet software is one of the world’s most popular
business tools, but it is regularly implicated in errors which can be costly,
or even dangerous, because of the ease with which it can be used in
situations it was not designed for.

In 2013, an Excel error at JPMorgan masked the loss of almost $6bn (4.6bn),
after a cell mistakenly divided by the sum of two interest rates, rather
than the average. The news led James Kwak, a professor of law at the
University of Connecticut, to warn that Excel is “incredibly fragile”.

“There is no way to trace where your data comes from, there’s no audit
trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy
way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone
can create Excel spreadsheets – badly. Because it’s so easy to use, the
creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who
understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way,”
Kwak wrote.

Errors from the spreadsheet software have even changed the very foundations
of human genetics. The names of 27 genes have been changed over the past
year by the Human Gene Nomenclature Committee, after Microsoft’s program
continually misformatted them. The genes SEPT1 and MARCH1, for instance,
have been changed to SEPTIN1 and MARCHF1 after they were repeatedly turned
into dates, while symbols that were common words have been altered so that
grammar tools didn’t autocorrect them: WARS is now WARS1, for instance.


5.完整新聞連結 (或短網址):
https://reurl.cc/7odK0l


6.備註:
*修正
簡言之就是
英國使用excel表單紀錄病例資料
因為用csv傳遞數據再匯入excel檔案
csv沒有檔案大小限制但excel有列數跟欄位上限(1048576列,16384欄)
導致9/25-10/2新增的15841確診病例未上傳到總數據表
甚至有超過五萬人潛在傳染者如接觸者並未被告知居家隔離
這兩天才有人發現這個問題
讓英國新冠疫情數據飆升

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