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A comment on How not to lose 16,000 Covid-19 test results: a data scientist’s view.

Re:How not to lose 16,000 Covid-19 test results: a data scie... by aaron695 on Sunday October 11, 2020 @07:22AM (#24745033)
Clearly written by someone without any real world experience. Daily checks and plots, and daily phone calls and meetings.....

But how we start by explaining this. Does the author expect us to believe they were using Excel 2003?

"I’m not going to complain about Public Health England (PHE) using excel to merge the test results from each test centre"

What actually happened, then perhaps we move onto solutions.

(The solution most likely being some sort of Hamming code/check sum, the number of cases is also included with the data for instance)

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Re:How not to lose 16,000 Covid-19 test results: a data scie... by proce55ing on Sunday October 11, 2020 @08:10AM (#24745239)
They did indeed use Excel to process the data. They could have possibly used a more recent version of Excel but saved the data in the legacy file format anyway.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988

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Re:How not to lose 16,000 Covid-19 test results: a data scie... by martingoodson on Sunday October 11, 2020 @09:11AM (#24745525)
Hamming codes? This comment is clearly written by someone with no real world experience of working in public sector IT. What I've outlined in the article is a basic solution that can be implemented by anyone.
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Re:How not to lose 16,000 Covid-19 test results: a data scie... by aaron695 on Monday October 12, 2020 @03:06AM (#24752113)
Sorry.

I didn't see it you who posted your article. That was a cunt comment.

I dont agree with you but I should have worded that differently.

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