3 ms·

> It's unlikely this will have had much impact since most reported cases were only a few days late I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but in case y

> It's unlikely this will have had much impact since most reported cases were only a few days late I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but in case you're not, this has meant c.16k people missed from having their contacts traced. That's time-critical. Delays of any number of days are very bad. People will likely die because of this error. This is safety-critical software. It should be stress tested and have sanity checks. It should be impossible for this to happen. For something like this system, part of a track and trace system costing billions, to fail because of a file size error is just unbelievable.

throwmeaway_pls 6y ago
The WHO estimated 750 million cumulative infections on Friday. This error is not unbelievable because the system is just a bit of political theater. There’s nothing more we can do against an endemic human coronavirus. It’s time to move on.
- hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
  Yeah we should give up on controlling polio, measles etc as well. After all polio only kills 0.5% of cases as well. </sarcasm>
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
I was being serious. Distributionally, most of the cases were 1-2 days before the error was spotted. To be clear though, when I said "not much impact", I didn't mean that people might not die because of it, only that it wouldn't affect the large scale functioning (such as it is) of the tracing operation.
- fuzzy2 6y ago
  > Distributionally, most of the cases were 1-2 days before the error was spotted. That’s always true though if the virus is spreading exponentially (dunno whether it currently does in the UK).
  - makomk 6y ago
    This is more true than it would be from pure exponential growth alone, especially the relatively slow exponential growth the UK as a whole currently seems to be seeing (doubling time maybe about a fortnight?) The issue was effectively dropping all results after a certain number from a particular location, so at the start relatively few results were dropped and it was spotted around the time that number started to become substantial. It's that hard cutoff where results suddenly start to be dropped that means most of them are in the last few days.
- hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
  Sadly it takes about 24 to get tested and 24 hours for the lab result. That gives very little time to trace contacts before they start entering the asymptomatic-but-infectious-to-others stage. A one day delay is a problem.

throwmeaway_pls 6y ago

The WHO estimated 750 million cumulative infections on Friday. This error is not unbelievable because the system is just a bit of political theater. There’s nothing more we can do against an endemic human coronavirus. It’s time to move on.

hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
Yeah we should give up on controlling polio, measles etc as well. After all polio only kills 0.5% of cases as well. </sarcasm>

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

I was being serious. Distributionally, most of the cases were 1-2 days before the error was spotted. To be clear though, when I said "not much impact", I didn't mean that people might not die because of it, only that it wouldn't affect the large scale functioning (such as it is) of the tracing operation.

fuzzy2 6y ago
> Distributionally, most of the cases were 1-2 days before the error was spotted. That’s always true though if the virus is spreading exponentially (dunno whether it currently does in the UK).
- makomk 6y ago
  This is more true than it would be from pure exponential growth alone, especially the relatively slow exponential growth the UK as a whole currently seems to be seeing (doubling time maybe about a fortnight?) The issue was effectively dropping all results after a certain number from a particular location, so at the start relatively few results were dropped and it was spotted around the time that number started to become substantial. It's that hard cutoff where results suddenly start to be dropped that means most of them are in the last few days.
hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y ago
Sadly it takes about 24 to get tested and 24 hours for the lab result. That gives very little time to trace contacts before they start entering the asymptomatic-but-infectious-to-others stage. A one day delay is a problem.