The UK Health Authority PHE announced that there were 15,841 missing case reports due to technical issues with data loading.
PHE is responsible for confirming the consistency of COVID-19 test results provided by public and private laboratories across the UK. This data must be published daily and the database is used for contact tracing measures. However, due to technical problems, the data entered from September 25th to October 2nd was temporarily suspended. Most of the loss data was reported from September 30 to October 2.
PHE said that all patients diagnosed as positive were notified of test results, and now all information has been added to the National Insurance Service NHS contact tracing system. But I wasted a lot of time on this issue. It is estimated that 50,000 contacts occurred while this problem was overlooked.
What was the cause of such a situation? PHE is raising suspicions that the Excel spreadsheet it used to compare test results had reached its data limits, but no one noticed until it was too late. Reportedly, it is speculated that the spreadsheet may have reached its maximum when the CSV file received from the lab is added to the master list. The upper limit of the spreadsheet is 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns.
In addition to this incident, JP Morgan also attributed its $60 billion loss in 2013 to an error in the Excel spreadsheet it used for financial modeling. Last August, the research team announced that they would change the names of 27 genes due to the problem that Excel converts gene abbreviations into dates. Related information can be found here.