In the United Kingdom as in France, the Covid-19 screening policy is intended to be massive.
And the organization wants to be concise to inform the population of the national evolution of the epidemic.
Read also: United Kingdom: a strange "internal border" could appear in Kent
Unfortunately, blunders can sometimes occur, and screening data is unfortunately lost.
On Monday, October 5, British health authorities revealed that nearly 16,000 confirmed cases had not been included in national reports on the virus between September 25 and October 2.
Public Health England, which counts new infections daily, specifies that they were 10.157 on September 30, and not 7.108 as announced.
And they were 11,057 on October 1, not 6,914.
On October 2, they thus reached 11,754, and not 6,968.
In fact, 16,000 Britons have not been taken care of by the national “
Test and Trace
” system, and the authorities have not been able to establish a list of their contact cases, potentially infected.
A limited Excel file
While the Johnson government evokes a "
technical problem
" to justify this passage under the radar, the British newspapers
The Guardian, The Daily Mail and
Sky News assure for their part that it is in reality a flaw of a old version of Microsoft Excel from 2003, used by authorities to compile data.
According to these media, the capacity of these files is limited to 65,536 cases and the Excel spreadsheet would then automatically stop downloading the test results beyond that.
A shame when you know that recent versions of Excel can contain nearly a million lines in a single file.
Faced with the anger of the British and the local authorities, the Ministry of Health is trying to defend itself and ensure that these forgotten positive cases have all the same been informed of their contamination in time and have remained isolated.
But the media across the Channel remain skeptical.
"
What has happened is that some of the data has been truncated and forgotten,
" the British Prime Minister said personally.
In the midst of the Conservative Party's annual conference, under tension with the slinging of some deputies from his own camp, Boris Johnson assured that the health authorities were currently scrambling to contact the contact cases of the forgotten at the national base.