The number of people infected with coronavirus in England may have dropped due to an Excel error. This was the explanation given by The Guardian.
Public Health England (PHE) stores data on infected people in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. However, the failure that occurred in the program on October 3-4 could lead to the loss of information about laboratory studies. Because of this, in England, about 16 thousand cases of infection could not be taken into account.
The Guardian's source believes that the error could have occurred because the table reached its maximum size, and data on the thousands of positive tests conducted between September 25 and October 2 were not loaded into the program. For example, in Excel there is a limit of 16 384 columns that a table can contain, so 15 841 infections were allegedly not taken into account. PHE did not confirm the information that a program error was the cause of the crash.
The Guardian notes that due to such an error, official statistics could not take into account another 50 thousand potential infections: if this is the case, and the infected do not know about the disease, this could lead to a large outbreak of COVID-19.
In mid-September, it was reported that to save from a new catastrophic pandemic, it was necessary to spend five dollars per person in the world annually. These huge costs will pay off as they help prevent damage comparable to that caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus – estimated at about $ 11 trillion.
