In the fall of 2020, in the midst of the global pandemic, a spreadsheet error resulted in the Public Health England underreporting COVID-19 infections by 15,841 cases.
Here’s how the error resulted: while a comma-separated-values (CSV) file can be any length, an Excel spreadsheet is limited to a little over one million rows. When the agency’s very long CSV file was opened in Excel, the file exceeded the limit, so the bottom rows were cut off and not displayed. As a result,…
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