6 ms·

Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle

61 points by jjgreen 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago
> Proposing the motion at this week's meeting, Dr Marks said: "I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day. So who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?" This sounds pretty standard to me. Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous. I don't think it makes sense to get the individual involved in trouble, but it isn't intellectually honest to pretend this is that strange or unreasonable. Offices are full of people who make things work in inefficient ways. Such is life. Improve the system if it fails, but there isn't any call to act surprised that the process is awkward. I expect there is a lot of politics at play here.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  Copy Paste technician, fabulous, up there with Prompt engineer
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Well, out of their, say, $50/hr rate, $1 is for the actual labor of copying and pasting, and $49 is for knowing what to copy and where to paste :).
    - jjgreen 3y ago
      If done by a civil servant (government employee), that would be grade AA (Admin Assistant) or AO (Admin Officer). An AO in London gets £24k/year, which is around £11.50/h, or $14/h https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/onscivilservantgradesandsalarybands https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
      - HPsquared 3y ago
        That's what they get, but their agency probably bills them out at £50/h
  - onionisafruit 3y ago
    Is prompt engineer a derogatory term for people who spend their work day at a shell prompt? If so, I can own up to being a prompt engineer. Or maybe it’s an engineer who does their work promptly. In that case, I’m not sure I qualify.
    - jjgreen 3y ago
      Neither, it's someone who crafts ChatGPT prompts to get the desired output (and that seems to be what they call themselves, so not really derogatory).
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - mananaysiempre 3y ago
    “Typical process latency: Someone copies and pastes data from a thing into another thing”[1]. Jokes aside, though, I don’t think it’s fair to criticise people for using the only user-accessible interapplication communication channel the industry has universally agreed to make work and not use as lock-in leverage. The spreadsheets being in different formats and lacking additional sheets that’d automatically reformat the data the way the next step needs is something I’d criticise, but I undertstand how that might be nonobvious if you aren’t lazy enough to think about automating everything you possibly can. [1] https://xkcd.com/2565/ https://xkcd.com/2565/
- sheepshear 3y ago
  That's not what they're saying. They're formally accusing management of not doing their jobs.
- CraigJPerry 3y ago
  >> often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous This is faulty logic. Human error isn't an exceptional thing, it's extremely common and expected. There's an entire field of study dedicated to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_reliability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_reliability In many scenarios the right thing to do is just accept the error risk - as humans, we often don't need perfect execution but i don't think this is one of those. The person quoted in the article gets it right: "We need senior management that know what they're doing, who realize that this is not, and never was, the way to run an HR system"
- hardlianotion 3y ago
  Excel stacks can be effective, but they need to be setup correctly and to have effective operational control. Royal College have a right to surprise - they are a client of ANRO and had to winkle the information out of them. Given the way things turned out, I think Dr Marks comments are also appropriate.
- codeulike 3y ago
  Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous This is true. Sounds like they have cobbled together a system using Excel because thats why you have to do when processes change all the time. The alternative is to find a 'proper' HR system to handle all the weird custom processes which is a massive three year project that costs tens of millions and then probably fails to deliver. IT people complain about people cobbling things together in Excel but in the short and medium term thats usually the only way for people to get shit done But yes management dropped the ball and should have had some checks and balances. No-one realised that every candidate from Wales got rejected? Thats a clanger.
  - DharmaPolice 3y ago
    >IT people complain about people cobbling things together in Excel but in the short and medium term thats usually the only way for people to get shit done This is true, and why I think it's a shame we never got a real replacement for Microsoft Access (not necessarily the functionality of Access but its intended purpose).
    - pjc50 3y ago
      If only there was a simple system for producing a database-driven set of screens in a webapp. It's the one thing which seems to have got worse since the eras of dBASE and FoxPro.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  No doubt there was never budget for HR software.
- DharmaPolice 3y ago
  Having worked with "spreadsheet stacks" for the last two decades I'd argue that although they can be effective in most cases they are error prone which is the point being made in your quote. And they become more error prone the more complex the "system" is and that's bad news because it's oh so easy to add more complexity whenever you want. I agree the practices described don't sound strange - they sound normal, but so does the resulting errors that occurred - also par for the course.
- cool_dude85 3y ago
  >Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous. I broadly agree with this, but there are ways to make the process effective and ways to make it incredibly error prone, like not having checks to ensure you paste into the correct columns. Obviously there are no such checks here.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Nobody cares about inefficient or brittle process that produce reasonable results, but when you mess up the careers of a number of people, someone's going to take a look at the process.
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
The previous article that is linked to in the text is worth a read to: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_recruitment_blunder/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_rec... "ANRO decided to honor the 10 job offers it had made by mistake and used Oriel to tell the candidates. Unfortunately, a system error in Oriel meant it then erroneously sent that communication to an additional 16 candidates. ANRO decided to honor these 16 additional offers too, and find the candidates posts."
- b112 3y ago
  But that's insane! These candidates hold people's lives in their hands, and they just hured unqualified candidates!
  - KeplerBoy 3y ago
    What makes you think they are unqualified? People get rejected because they are not the best fit, not because they are unfit.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    > and they just hired unqualified candidates! They're still people with valid medical licenses - the pool of candidates wouldn't have people who couldn't legally practice medicine, so I'd assume the qualification criteria they were being assessed on is unrelated to their ability to not accidentally kill me on the OR table.
  - helsinkiandrew 3y ago
    > and they just hured unqualified candidates Hopefully not unqualified, just not the "best" available
    - orwin 3y ago
      As defined by the interview process.
      - 3y ago
jackvalentine 3y ago
Honestly sometimes I just want to go back to paper. Laying out 24 recruitment folders with a cover sheet that has their score in the right order.
- nisegami 3y ago
  I wish we could do a semiconductor-free week or something at my job and revert to pen+paper for a bit (no printers/scanners).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
curiousgal 3y ago
I don't understand why they're blaming Excel. It seems like a fairly straightforward operational error.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  They are blkaming the process that is uncontolled which uses Excel. They also blam Oriel which is another system
  - permo-w 3y ago
    are you commenting from a corporate system that censors the word "blame"?
    - jjgreen 3y ago
      git blam
    - pasc1878 3y ago
      No just fat fingers and poor eyesight :)
- yunohn 3y ago
  Yep exactly - nobody thought to double check the original/final sheets when the results looked a bit off?
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    Assume that ANRO is a "normal" government bureaucracy - any people inclined to double-checking, questioning things, or caring much about the real-world outcomes get systematically weeded out.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
People think that Excel is the most used "programming language" in the world. Which may or may not be true. But the one truth is this: the world runs on broken Excel spreadsheets. People have no idea. The number of decisions taken higher up the chain based on wrong numbers are beyond belief. If you've ever been tasked to rewrite a semi-advanced Excel spreadsheet to a dedicated (web)app, you know. I'm a coder and I do use spreadsheets (not Excel though). Spreadsheets in the hands of programmers are okay. But thinking that somehow because Joel Spolsky can use advanced Excel features, regular people can too, then you're being completely delusional. You can't have it both ways: either it's the most used programming language in the world and it has to be used by programmers, or it's a recipe for incorrectness.
- cryptonym 3y ago
  Tools wrongly used, mistakes carried up to top management, this is nothing new and not Excel-specific. They are usually looking at numbers to support decisions, not much for actual guidance/directions.
- onionisafruit 3y ago
  If it’s a programming language, then its users are programmers. Just like with javascript or c, some of those programmers are more skilled than others.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > People have no idea. The number of decisions taken higher up the chain based on wrong numbers are beyond belief. Yup. That's a lesson in how robust organizational systems are - the errors mostly get compensated for somewhere downstream, so visibly bad outcomes are rare. > If you've ever been tasked to rewrite a semi-advanced Excel spreadsheet to a dedicated (web)app, you know. Yeah, I know. I've worked in a place that tried and failed to beat an Excel plugin with a web app. The thing is, in my experience, you'll have a team spend two years doing the rewrite - with a lot of that going into designing and then building complex web frontend using modern tech stack - and in the end, you'll get a dedicated application that has less functionality and worse ergonomics than the spreadsheet you tried to replace. The timeframes and costs involved with getting a Proper Software Development Team to build you a Proper App For That are absurd, and are only getting worse with everyone wanting to do bespoke web SPAs using modern practices and tool stacks. Even if one could afford that, the outcome is unlikely to be better for actual users. And so Excel stays, covering for all the processes that are custom enough that there is no ready-made popular Enterprise SaaS on the market that management can order people to use instead.
surgicalcolor 3y ago
This is such a weird body for comments. You have devs in here shrugging and saying "hey it works, no big deal" when it comes to a business process. But if it comes to svelte vs react vs whatever it's a butlerian jihad where everyone's accusing eachother of not even knowing how to program. sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit.
- pjc50 3y ago
  There's a very "bikeshedding" property at work where the fewer "real" consequences come from a decision, the more heated the discussion gets because it's purely opinionated. (there are also a number of HN commentators who are reliably noisily wrong about things, but not in such a blatant way that they get obliterated in downvotes, and one of them started that top level thread)
  - tormeh 3y ago
    See pineapple on pizza. It's fun to discuss precisely because of how trivial it is, not despite it.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit. Yes? I thought this is common knowledge. Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination, and yet most of the jobs in our profession are at best boring - the high-paying ones usually involve making actively harmful things that shouldn't exist in the first place (see e.g. whole adtech for starters), and most of the rest are so mired in office politics or business constraints that the outcomes are guaranteed to be shit. A lot of strangeness in the dev culture can be viewed as coping mechanisms. Meanwhile, after doing this work long enough, you end up realizing that disturbingly many SaaS tools offer much less utility and worse ergonomics than an Excel spreadsheet.
  - tight-ship 3y ago
    It's just a reflection of humanity in general. Nothing special.
tompccs 3y ago
I'm sure Byzantine HR processes are constantly being bungled, but you almost never hear about it. These processes only exist because every hiring decision needs a paper trail to show compliance with a myriad of employment and discrimination law. Next time you wonder why orgs seem to have a high concentration of talent when small, and then get diluted with deadweight as they grow, know that this is one of the reasons why.
heisenbit 3y ago
They had 24 applicants and they ran the process seemingly fully on excel and technocratic HR and email. If these decisions were only involving human subject matter experts this would not have happened. Imagine you need someone, define criteria, get two dozens CVs and then HR tells you nope: they are all no-go. Most would say WTF or go ballistic. But if HR is in the driving seat alone and makes final decisions alone without human contact - anything goes. Thankfully it will be all getting better when we delegate that to A.I..
mikewarot 3y ago
>An error meant "rank" was confused with the interview score We'll... There's your problem. It doesn't matter what tool you use if the definition of the system is broken.
quitit 3y ago
Reminds me of the excel-bungling during the covid pandemic. >A million-row limit on Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software may have led to Public Health England misplacing nearly 16,000 Covid test results, it is understood. The data error, which led to 15,841 positive tests being left off the official daily figures, means than 50,000 potentially infectious people may have been missed by contact tracers and not told to self-isolate. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-may-have-caused-loss-of-16000-covid-tests-in-england https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-m...

61 points by jjgreen 3y ago

> Proposing the motion at this week's meeting, Dr Marks said: "I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day. So who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?" This sounds pretty standard to me. Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous. I don't think it makes sense to get the individual involved in trouble, but it isn't intellectually honest to pretend this is that strange or unreasonable. Offices are full of people who make things work in inefficient ways. Such is life. Improve the system if it fails, but there isn't any call to act surprised that the process is awkward. I expect there is a lot of politics at play here.

jjgreen 3y ago
Copy Paste technician, fabulous, up there with Prompt engineer
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Well, out of their, say, $50/hr rate, $1 is for the actual labor of copying and pasting, and $49 is for knowing what to copy and where to paste :).
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    If done by a civil servant (government employee), that would be grade AA (Admin Assistant) or AO (Admin Officer). An AO in London gets £24k/year, which is around £11.50/h, or $14/h https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/onscivilservantgradesandsalarybands https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      That's what they get, but their agency probably bills them out at £50/h
- onionisafruit 3y ago
  Is prompt engineer a derogatory term for people who spend their work day at a shell prompt? If so, I can own up to being a prompt engineer. Or maybe it’s an engineer who does their work promptly. In that case, I’m not sure I qualify.
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    Neither, it's someone who crafts ChatGPT prompts to get the desired output (and that seems to be what they call themselves, so not really derogatory).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  “Typical process latency: Someone copies and pastes data from a thing into another thing”[1]. Jokes aside, though, I don’t think it’s fair to criticise people for using the only user-accessible interapplication communication channel the industry has universally agreed to make work and not use as lock-in leverage. The spreadsheets being in different formats and lacking additional sheets that’d automatically reformat the data the way the next step needs is something I’d criticise, but I undertstand how that might be nonobvious if you aren’t lazy enough to think about automating everything you possibly can. [1] https://xkcd.com/2565/ https://xkcd.com/2565/
sheepshear 3y ago
That's not what they're saying. They're formally accusing management of not doing their jobs.
CraigJPerry 3y ago
>> often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous This is faulty logic. Human error isn't an exceptional thing, it's extremely common and expected. There's an entire field of study dedicated to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_reliability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_reliability In many scenarios the right thing to do is just accept the error risk - as humans, we often don't need perfect execution but i don't think this is one of those. The person quoted in the article gets it right: "We need senior management that know what they're doing, who realize that this is not, and never was, the way to run an HR system"
hardlianotion 3y ago
Excel stacks can be effective, but they need to be setup correctly and to have effective operational control. Royal College have a right to surprise - they are a client of ANRO and had to winkle the information out of them. Given the way things turned out, I think Dr Marks comments are also appropriate.
codeulike 3y ago
Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous This is true. Sounds like they have cobbled together a system using Excel because thats why you have to do when processes change all the time. The alternative is to find a 'proper' HR system to handle all the weird custom processes which is a massive three year project that costs tens of millions and then probably fails to deliver. IT people complain about people cobbling things together in Excel but in the short and medium term thats usually the only way for people to get shit done But yes management dropped the ball and should have had some checks and balances. No-one realised that every candidate from Wales got rejected? Thats a clanger.
- DharmaPolice 3y ago
  >IT people complain about people cobbling things together in Excel but in the short and medium term thats usually the only way for people to get shit done This is true, and why I think it's a shame we never got a real replacement for Microsoft Access (not necessarily the functionality of Access but its intended purpose).
  - pjc50 3y ago
    If only there was a simple system for producing a database-driven set of screens in a webapp. It's the one thing which seems to have got worse since the eras of dBASE and FoxPro.
andrewstuart 3y ago
No doubt there was never budget for HR software.
DharmaPolice 3y ago
Having worked with "spreadsheet stacks" for the last two decades I'd argue that although they can be effective in most cases they are error prone which is the point being made in your quote. And they become more error prone the more complex the "system" is and that's bad news because it's oh so easy to add more complexity whenever you want. I agree the practices described don't sound strange - they sound normal, but so does the resulting errors that occurred - also par for the course.
cool_dude85 3y ago
>Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous. I broadly agree with this, but there are ways to make the process effective and ways to make it incredibly error prone, like not having checks to ensure you paste into the correct columns. Obviously there are no such checks here.
pjc50 3y ago
Nobody cares about inefficient or brittle process that produce reasonable results, but when you mess up the careers of a number of people, someone's going to take a look at the process.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

The previous article that is linked to in the text is worth a read to: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_recruitment_blunder/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_rec... "ANRO decided to honor the 10 job offers it had made by mistake and used Oriel to tell the candidates. Unfortunately, a system error in Oriel meant it then erroneously sent that communication to an additional 16 candidates. ANRO decided to honor these 16 additional offers too, and find the candidates posts."

b112 3y ago
But that's insane! These candidates hold people's lives in their hands, and they just hured unqualified candidates!
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  What makes you think they are unqualified? People get rejected because they are not the best fit, not because they are unfit.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > and they just hired unqualified candidates! They're still people with valid medical licenses - the pool of candidates wouldn't have people who couldn't legally practice medicine, so I'd assume the qualification criteria they were being assessed on is unrelated to their ability to not accidentally kill me on the OR table.
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  > and they just hured unqualified candidates Hopefully not unqualified, just not the "best" available
  - orwin 3y ago
    As defined by the interview process.
    - 3y ago

jackvalentine 3y ago

Honestly sometimes I just want to go back to paper. Laying out 24 recruitment folders with a cover sheet that has their score in the right order.

nisegami 3y ago
I wish we could do a semiconductor-free week or something at my job and revert to pen+paper for a bit (no printers/scanners).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

curiousgal 3y ago

I don't understand why they're blaming Excel. It seems like a fairly straightforward operational error.

pasc1878 3y ago
They are blkaming the process that is uncontolled which uses Excel. They also blam Oriel which is another system
- permo-w 3y ago
  are you commenting from a corporate system that censors the word "blame"?
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    git blam
  - pasc1878 3y ago
    No just fat fingers and poor eyesight :)
yunohn 3y ago
Yep exactly - nobody thought to double check the original/final sheets when the results looked a bit off?
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Assume that ANRO is a "normal" government bureaucracy - any people inclined to double-checking, questioning things, or caring much about the real-world outcomes get systematically weeded out.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

People think that Excel is the most used "programming language" in the world. Which may or may not be true. But the one truth is this: the world runs on broken Excel spreadsheets. People have no idea. The number of decisions taken higher up the chain based on wrong numbers are beyond belief. If you've ever been tasked to rewrite a semi-advanced Excel spreadsheet to a dedicated (web)app, you know. I'm a coder and I do use spreadsheets (not Excel though). Spreadsheets in the hands of programmers are okay. But thinking that somehow because Joel Spolsky can use advanced Excel features, regular people can too, then you're being completely delusional. You can't have it both ways: either it's the most used programming language in the world and it has to be used by programmers, or it's a recipe for incorrectness.

cryptonym 3y ago
Tools wrongly used, mistakes carried up to top management, this is nothing new and not Excel-specific. They are usually looking at numbers to support decisions, not much for actual guidance/directions.
onionisafruit 3y ago
If it’s a programming language, then its users are programmers. Just like with javascript or c, some of those programmers are more skilled than others.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> People have no idea. The number of decisions taken higher up the chain based on wrong numbers are beyond belief. Yup. That's a lesson in how robust organizational systems are - the errors mostly get compensated for somewhere downstream, so visibly bad outcomes are rare. > If you've ever been tasked to rewrite a semi-advanced Excel spreadsheet to a dedicated (web)app, you know. Yeah, I know. I've worked in a place that tried and failed to beat an Excel plugin with a web app. The thing is, in my experience, you'll have a team spend two years doing the rewrite - with a lot of that going into designing and then building complex web frontend using modern tech stack - and in the end, you'll get a dedicated application that has less functionality and worse ergonomics than the spreadsheet you tried to replace. The timeframes and costs involved with getting a Proper Software Development Team to build you a Proper App For That are absurd, and are only getting worse with everyone wanting to do bespoke web SPAs using modern practices and tool stacks. Even if one could afford that, the outcome is unlikely to be better for actual users. And so Excel stays, covering for all the processes that are custom enough that there is no ready-made popular Enterprise SaaS on the market that management can order people to use instead.

surgicalcolor 3y ago

This is such a weird body for comments. You have devs in here shrugging and saying "hey it works, no big deal" when it comes to a business process. But if it comes to svelte vs react vs whatever it's a butlerian jihad where everyone's accusing eachother of not even knowing how to program. sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit.

pjc50 3y ago
There's a very "bikeshedding" property at work where the fewer "real" consequences come from a decision, the more heated the discussion gets because it's purely opinionated. (there are also a number of HN commentators who are reliably noisily wrong about things, but not in such a blatant way that they get obliterated in downvotes, and one of them started that top level thread)
- tormeh 3y ago
  See pineapple on pizza. It's fun to discuss precisely because of how trivial it is, not despite it.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> sometimes I wonder if most of us do the job to play with silly tools rather than actually make shit. Yes? I thought this is common knowledge. Here's a universal tool whose potential is limited only by one's imagination, and yet most of the jobs in our profession are at best boring - the high-paying ones usually involve making actively harmful things that shouldn't exist in the first place (see e.g. whole adtech for starters), and most of the rest are so mired in office politics or business constraints that the outcomes are guaranteed to be shit. A lot of strangeness in the dev culture can be viewed as coping mechanisms. Meanwhile, after doing this work long enough, you end up realizing that disturbingly many SaaS tools offer much less utility and worse ergonomics than an Excel spreadsheet.
- tight-ship 3y ago
  It's just a reflection of humanity in general. Nothing special.

tompccs 3y ago

I'm sure Byzantine HR processes are constantly being bungled, but you almost never hear about it. These processes only exist because every hiring decision needs a paper trail to show compliance with a myriad of employment and discrimination law. Next time you wonder why orgs seem to have a high concentration of talent when small, and then get diluted with deadweight as they grow, know that this is one of the reasons why.

heisenbit 3y ago

They had 24 applicants and they ran the process seemingly fully on excel and technocratic HR and email. If these decisions were only involving human subject matter experts this would not have happened. Imagine you need someone, define criteria, get two dozens CVs and then HR tells you nope: they are all no-go. Most would say WTF or go ballistic. But if HR is in the driving seat alone and makes final decisions alone without human contact - anything goes. Thankfully it will be all getting better when we delegate that to A.I..

mikewarot 3y ago

>An error meant "rank" was confused with the interview score We'll... There's your problem. It doesn't matter what tool you use if the definition of the system is broken.

quitit 3y ago

Reminds me of the excel-bungling during the covid pandemic. >A million-row limit on Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet software may have led to Public Health England misplacing nearly 16,000 Covid test results, it is understood. The data error, which led to 15,841 positive tests being left off the official daily figures, means than 50,000 potentially infectious people may have been missed by contact tracers and not told to self-isolate. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-may-have-caused-loss-of-16000-covid-tests-in-england https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-m...