Simple Errors Kill When It Comes To Covid-19

Get the public health people some resources:

The paper in question actually appeared on the MedRxiv preprint server just before Christmas (which is my excuse for missing it until now), and carries the title: “Does Contact Tracing Work? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from an Excel Error in England.”

... But this particular paper tells a very special story—one of a nation forced to wing it in the face of a massive threat, due to poor planning on the part of public officials, the sudden understanding that even a half-hearted effort could save thousands of lives, and how a choice that seemed absolutely meaningless caused more deaths than some of the worst battles of World War II.

The story goes like this: As COVID-19 was spilling out across the planet, the U.K., like the U.S., was doing essentially nothing. On top of this, decades of alternating dominance by neo-liberals in both major parties had starved the National Health Service of beds, doctors, and supplies, much less anything so frivolous as planning for future emergencies. 

...The technical error in this case was that the Excel sheet was being saved in the older .xls format instead of the newer .xlsx format. For your family budget, this would not make a difference. However, the .xls format is limited to 65,536 rows. So, every day from September 25, 2020 to October 2, 2020, the people managing this sheet added thousands of names. And every day those names were simply lost, as the sheet was at the limit.

When this was realized on October 2, the format was changed, but looking back on the 15,841 contacts that had not been made provided one opportunity—it allowed researchers to see the results of outcomes from this group that had not been contacted, compared to the people both before and after who were contacted. As a result, they were able to estimate that the week-long failure of case tracing cost about 1,500 lives.

...It’s almost hard to notice that, in the end, what this paper shows is that case tracing works. The researchers were able to effectively repudiate official statements from the U.K. government and their supposed team of expert advisors who insisted that case tracing would have “little impact” by showing that in just this case, the number of deaths connected to these missed calls was significantly higher than in the cases of those contacts.