[Ed P]

Sack Dido Harding the incompetent leader of Track & Trace!

Unfortunately it looks as though we will soon be paying the predictable price for all those who enjoyed a Summer holiday in Covid hotspots and Welsh Con-club members who went on a bus tour around pubs en route to Doncaster races.  The price appears to be another short sharp National lock-down is on the horizon, or maybe hard selective lock downs for the high transmission cities and surrounding areas.

Accurate info will help you predict some of the rational and not so rational moves that our incompetent Government will make. This handy link pulls together a mass of National info. in an easy to read format.

link

[Ed P]

Sack Dido Harding – The Queen of Carnage!

It beggars belief, but the latest Dept of Health cock-up was their use of Excel Spreadsheets to record and transfer Covid testing results. Test results exceeded the allowable row count (obsolete Excel spreadsheets are used), and the excess was quietly dropped and not transferred into Test &Trace so inflicting more death and carnage on the North-West of England.

Hancock’s latest apology was less than fulsome, but the real horrendous details are revealed on ElReg.

Why did it happen – easy, it was done on the cheap by a bunch of IT amateurs. It is all down to a critical lack of NHS funding and Government policies of outsourcing IT expertise.

[Dave Rice]

It was part of my job 25 years+ ago as Regional Computer Manager (a brand new post for a new world) to stamp on this practice. Poacher turned Gamekeeper :whistle: but now we were moving from cheerful amateurs in (mostly) Finance to a PC on a third of desks in the new Regional Office. Within 3 years that was 100% as I believed in handing power to end users.

Things can soon move from a quick and dirty spreadsheet having VBA added to it to a line of business app if you didn’t watch out. It didn’t take long to know who would be likely to produce such things but rather than banning them (a useless activity) I encouraged them to tidy them up then I would submit the idea to be properly scoped and costed. Most gave up when faced with the rigours of even commentating their code, never mind documentation, but we did get one gem out of it.

In this case it looks like it was a quick lowest common denominator job; output CSV, load list into Excel. Probably automated so that it could be done quickly and had errors suppressed so that the warning of excess lines was never seen.

Clearly not even any sanity checking i.e. how many lines in in total, how many lines out in total. For that the developers of that bit must take the rap. Blaming it on the file format is no excuse, that should have been checked out before going into production.

I don’t know about you, but I thought this would all be done with a proper SQL database system. It seems not. CSV still keeps the world going round for data transfer but Excel as a production system? WTF?

The whole thing smacks of quick and dirty done on the cheap with real developers doing a CYA in the background. Big £££s to the friends of the PM the directors of the private companies hired though. I expect they will get a bonus out of it somehow too.

The civil service are of course getting the blame but I’ll bet a proper enquiry would find a big CYA exercise there too when they saw what was coming. They are masters at it as they are an easy target for incompetent ministers.

[Ed P]

I agree SQL would have been the ideal, and MySQL is even free and works under Windows. I would not think it would have cost too much to hire a pro to do a proper job and it would not have taken very many hours to complete it including error checking encryption etc. and of course documentation and management information reports.

One of the first things I ever learned in Systems was that interfaces were where all the stuff-ups occur, and lines read, checksums etc would have been the first thoughts of any pro., even if they were given no money for doing a proper job.

[Ed P]

Sack Dido Harding – The Queen of Carnage!

Under her ‘leadership’ or lack of it, Boris’s ‘World Beating’ track & Trace system is going backwards and we have almost reached the point where the majority of potential Covid carriers are not being contacted. Despite this the UK tax-payer is forking out £7000/day for ineffective work to improve the system by the Boston Consulting Group – talk about asleep at the wheel. She was a useless leader at Talk-Talk and learned nothing from the experience.

The inept leading the inept.

[Ed P]

Sack Dido Harding — The Queen of Carnage!

Our “world-beating” :wacko: Test & Trace system seems to get worse by the day.

However, at long last they are rolling out sewage testing at 90 sites across mainland UK, and maybe the work by Bangor Uni (and others) will get Dido Harding out of the poo!

link

[Boris]

Never trust an atom - they make up everything !

[RSB]

:good:

Americans: Over Sexed, Over Payed and Over here, Wat Wat!

[Ed P]

Sack Dido Harding — The Queen of Carnage!

I see that even the Conservative leadership are getting fed-up with her, and referring to “a vacuum of leadership in Test and Trace”. I suppose that is a nice way of calling her an empty headed air-head who just flaps around!

They really should have known better than to ever appoint her given her terrible leadership of Talk Talk.

[JayCeeDee]

Obviously a friend of a friend in high places!! Or she knew something embarrassing about one!! :whistle: :yes:

[Dave Rice]

She’s part of the gravy train club. It’s modelled on the manager of the Hotel California’s job description.

[Ed P]

She was made a Baroness by David Cameron and is on the board of the Jockey Club – hence the disastrous decision to delay the first lock-down to allow the Cheltenham Festival to take place. Her career reads like the script for a business disaster movie, and culminated in a “Marketing” headline which is still appropriate today:

‘…. Dido Harding’s utter ignorance is a lesson to us all’.

I’m not sure she could even remember where any political bodies are buried – its the old story of ‘not what, but who you know’

[JayCeeDee]

“Relax”, said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave”

 

Hmmmm……….. looks like we might be stuck with her for a while then. :negative: :wacko:

[Ed P]

I thought I had read all her ‘app’ horror stories, but the latest takes the biscuit and Mushroom Matt was caught out in Parliament lying being mistaken again!

link

[edit] I think The Commons should have a ‘naughty step’ for all those Ministers who are caught out ‘being mistaken’.

[Ed P]

Thankfully the days of Mushroom Matt hoarding all the info are nearly all gone. The Government is now less able to conceal what a pigs-ear it is making of its Covid-19 measures.

The interactive map showing new cases in your area has been around for a few weeks. link You can zoom in with the middle mouse button to an area containing about 7000 people and get a feel for what precautions you need to take for your next trip to the shops. Unfortunately outside England, the local equivalents of Mushroom Matt still hold sway and the data is nowhere near as granular. (It may be worth complaining to your MP!)

In addition to this, we now have UCL analysing the data and identifying all the holes in the Government information system. There is an old management saying — ‘if you do not know where you are, and you don’t know where you want to go, then you are in a real mess — just like Dido Harding.

The UCL analysis shows that we know nothing about those eligible to claim the £500 Covid grant from their local authorities. Details on numbers, location and whether they are all claiming are totally absent. It is therefore unsurprising that Matt Hancock lied to Parliament over the missing Track&Trace button. This analysis also highlights that only 16% of those infected with Covid are advised to isolate, and that data on actual isolation and support are then completely absent.

The UCL link is well worth book-marking and may assist those in the North of England to play hell with their MPs who doubtless have no idea how badly Dido,  Queen of Chaos is performing.

[Ed P]

I find myself in a dichotomy.

Half of me is pleased that by going into a hard lock-down now, we avoid having to do it during the period a Hard Brexit locks us out of the world. The other half of me does not know whether to laugh or cry at the way the scientific community probably sand-bagged our inept Government into doing the right thing.

Why do I say sand-bagged?  Because they built in implicit assumptions that regional measures were not working, and ignored data such as that for Liverpool which shows a 25% DROP in the number of cases. In fact if you look at the data for the early Tier 3 adopters they all show the same trend (Manchester was late to adopt and is still rising).

[Ed P]

Yep they WERE sandbagged and this has now been confirmed by the official statistics watchdog.

It was of course perfectly obvious to anyone who had looked at the UK data and had even a modicum of experience in handling statistics.

There is an old tried and tested saying for all computer modelling:

Crap in = steaming heaps of crap out.

Moral – always critically examine the assumptions that are used.

[PlaneMan]

Ed, it’s fine.

Trump has said many times that COVID-19 is not a problem………

It’s not like he’s a complete rsole or anything. :scratch:

[Ed P]

Have you noticed that BoJo is definitely not the person who managed to entrance most of the electorate. Even the EU have complained that BoJo now seems unable to grasp details.

Similarly Trump has become even more outrageous in his behaviour, and wild in his accusations,

There is a medical explanation for both these observations.

Brain Fog – its an official post-Covid symptom. link :wacko:

[Ed P]

It is interesting comparing the US and UK with respect to vaccine priority.

The UK emphasis is on offloading pressure on the NHS e.g. Care Homes & Old Pharts/vulnerable first.

The growing US position is that the young 18-30 year old super spreaders should be vaccinated first leaving the vulnerable to continue to look after their own safety.

There is merit in both arguments, but I tend to think the US position is more pragmatic and will result in a faster return to normalcy and economic well-being. The US position is not getting any airing over here as I think the old pharts in the Commons are giving themselves the highest priority (as usual). It is however an interesting topic for debate. :wacko:

[Author]

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