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> An example for this is UK's covid case tracking early on. Your choice of the UK's Covid tracking spreadsheet debacle to illustrate your point is curious, to
by stevesimmons 5y ago
> An example for this is UK's covid case tracking early on.
Your choice of the UK's Covid tracking spreadsheet debacle to illustrate your point is curious, to put it politely.
As The Register [1] (and many others) pointed out at the time, it was the wrong tech choice, executed slowly and at huge cost, by the wrong people with little knowledge of better choices, and directed by management and government leaders with track records of lying and incompetence.
> They couldn't have start by firstly building the perfect data collection solution because they wouldn't know how things will pan out and if they tried to force their way(i.e. mandatory formats by the tests centres) it would have been too big of a projects.
I have a different view on every part of this sentence!
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronavirus_contact_error/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronav...
- stevesimmons 5y agoBy the way, the error happened when the UK was experiencing 7,500 new cases a day. Pretty much any tech choice (including Excel done sensibly) would work for those volumes.
- mrtksn 5y agoI don't say anything different, actually. As I said, had they chosen something that's not that unreasonably limited, we would have never known about it since there wouldn't be a cockup. When the policy(back then nothing was clear) is in place for good, then they can build something elegant and efficient. IMHO, they should have had it before the pandemic even was a thing but that's totally another discussion.