{"id":30351,"date":"2020-10-05T16:02:24","date_gmt":"2020-10-05T20:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=30351"},"modified":"2020-10-05T16:02:24","modified_gmt":"2020-10-05T20:02:24","slug":"uk-covid-19-cases-missed-due-to-excel-glitch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/05\/uk-covid-19-cases-missed-due-to-excel-glitch\/","title":{"rendered":"UK COVID-19 Cases Missed Due to Excel Glitch"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Tapsfield<\/a> (also: Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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The extraordinary meltdown was caused by an Excel spreadsheet containing lab results reaching its maximum size, and failing to update. Some 15,841 cases between September 25 and October 2 were not uploaded to the government dashboard.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The problems are believed to have arisen when labs sent in their results using CSV files, which have no limits on size. But PHE then imported the results into Excel, where documents have a limit of just over a million lines.<\/p>\n

The technical issue has now been resolved by splitting the Excel files into batches.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Alex Hern<\/a> (tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Excel recently turned<\/a> 35<\/a>, and it sounds like they were using<\/a> the old .xls<\/tt> format that was superseded in 2003<\/a>. The .xlsx<\/tt> format has higher limits<\/a>, but even 1,048,576 rows is less than one doubling away from the 516K total cases in the UK that Google currently reports.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n