Covid-19 the second wave.

[Chippy_Tea]

Testing has uncovered 170 cases of Covid-19 among workers at a pork meat processing plant in Cornwall.

Five hundred staff at Pilgrim's Pride in Pool, near Camborne, were tested in a contact tracing exercise by the NHS.

Most of those who tested positive were unaware they had Covid-19 and were not displaying symptoms.

They and those they have been in close contact with are isolating in line with government guidelines, said Cornwall Council.

Cases of Covid-19 in the South West are still below the national average, latest figures show.

Cornwall remains the area in the region with the highest number of cases.

In the week to Sunday, numbers rose from 115 to 180. The infection rate is 31.5 per 100,000.

"In total, almost 500 employees at the factory have been tested and the vast majority of the cases who tested positive were not displaying symptoms," said Cornwall Council.

Rachel Wigglesworth, interim director for Public Health for Cornwall Council, said: "In finding people who weren't displaying symptoms we have potentially stopped much wider spread in our communities".

Council leader Julian German said "proactive testing" was "helping us to take action quickly to limit the spread of Covid in our communities".

Pilgrim's Pride said in a statement said "from the outset" it had "worked conscientiously to do all we can to protect our workforce and the local community".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-54361824

 

[marshbrewer]

There seems to be a lot of transmission at food type plants and factories, there were a load of cases in Newark that were traced to a desert factory.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Something that's been seen around the world, they're ideal places for spread in many ways - they're geared up to squeezing a lot of workers into a relatively small, confined space indoors - and cold rooms etc deliberately have poor ventilation to keep the cold air in. Also they're noisy so people have to shout to hear themselves heard, which is good for spread.

Plus the wages are pretty crap so the workers are heavily dependent on buses to get to work and live in crowded accommodation.

 

[Portreath]

Pilgrim's Pride they are calling it now!!. It was always known as Tulip down here and It never had a great reputation. They have a high proportion of European migrants on their workforce, and from speaking with an ex employee, the workers are not at the forefront of the companies list of priorities. Along with what @Northern_Brewer states these are all contributing factors. A covid-bomb waiting to happen.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Tulip is the local company, which was owned by Crown (Danish) until they sold it a year ago to Pilgrim's Pride (USian), which is majority-owned by JBS (Brazilian), the world's largest meat processor.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

4 October 2020

The UK has announced more than 10,000 new coronavirus cases for the first time since mass testing began.

There were 12,872 new cases, while a further 49 people have died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19.

However, the government said a technical issue meant some cases this week were not recorded at the time so these were included in Saturday's data.

It comes after data earlier this week had suggested infections may be rising more slowly than in previous weeks.

That data was based on weekly testing among a sample of people in the community to get an idea of how many people in England have the virus at any time.

The government also closely watches the daily number of positive cases, as it provides the most up-to-date snapshot.

However, it published a cautionary message on its "data dashboard", explaining that the totals reported over the coming days would include some cases from the previous week, "increasing the number of cases reported".

A Department of Health spokesman said the issue did not affect people receiving test results, and all those who tested positive have been informed in the normal way.

The announcement of the apparent glitch in the daily count comes "at an awkward moment", according to BBC health editor Hugh Pym, "when there is intense scrutiny of daily Covid-19 data as ministers and health chiefs try to assess the rate of spread of the virus".

He added: "After criticism in recent months over the way total tests are counted, ministers and officials will now face more questions over the compilation of daily case data."


The daily total saw a significant rise from 4,044 on Monday to a then-high of 7,143 on Tuesday. However, over the next four days the daily total remained stable - varying between 6,914 and 7,108 - at a time when continued increases might have been expected.

And then came the big leap in numbers announced on Saturday, a far bigger day-on-day increase than at any time in the entire pandemic, which were announced five hours later than the usual time and were accompanied by the government explanation.

The figures announced on Saturday would also have been partially inflated by the fact that 264,979 tests were processed the previous day, the third highest there has been so far in a single 24-hour period.


Full article - UK announces more than 10,000 new cases

 

[marshbrewer]

Have you seen what the 'technical issue' was!?!? They were recording results on a blooming Excel spreadsheet and the file size got too large. Schoolboy IT error.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

 

[simon12]

Has anyone got an explanation for the following:
Using numbers for England only not UK, everything was at its most open from 4th July but hospital admissions carried on dropping for around 8 weeks and deaths for a full 2 months. Then hospital admissions start rising again slowly in late August and faster in the 1st 20 days of September going up just as fast before schools went back as after and since about 20th September not rising as fast as before.

 

[marshbrewer]

If the clusters of positive tests are any indication, then is this the students returning to Uni?

 

[Northern_Brewer]

It was far from an "instant" opening on 4 July - the likes of gyms didn't open til the end of July, they didn't start experimenting with eg 20% crowds at sporting events until August, a lot of amateur sport is still only taking baby steps towards returning.

And a massive factor is the weather being nice until mid August or so.

Deaths are a lagging indicator by a month.

If you add in the data that went AWOL in Excel, that plateau in late September disappears, quite the opposite in fact. Before:

After:

 

[dad_of_jon]

Have you seen what the 'technical issue' was!?!? They were recording results on a blooming Excel spreadsheet and the file size got too large. Schoolboy IT error.

I remember a chap in finance at my old workplace complaining years ago that he could only load 65000* lines into excel from the accounts system. He was like a pig in **** once we upgraded to the newer version of excel. Do your worst I said. He did - Nobody could access the finance system until his massive export finished. From then on he had to do it late Friday pm. He was dumping the whole finance systems transactions to excel rather than applying a bloomin' filter first.
* probably 65535

 

[simon12]

Have you seen what the 'technical issue' was!?!? They were recording results on a blooming Excel spreadsheet and the file size got too large. Schoolboy IT error.

Yet again it all leads back to Bill Gates

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Luxury when I started work computers were as big as a house and the Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) system ran over a full weekend to tell us what to buy.

 

[marshbrewer]

Materials Requirement Planning (MRP)

Blimey, that takes me back to my Uni days!

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Yet again it all leads back to Bill Gates

Not really - blaming Bill Gates for this is like blaming the spade maker when someone tries to dig the Channel Tunnel with a spade.

What will have happened is that the people in the testing lab will have received a call at the last moment from PHE saying that they need the data, and whoever was most familiar with "coding" (probably some junior lab rat) will have used the tool they are most familiar with (Excel) to hack up something that's good enough to keep PHE happy whilst they go back to fighting 101 fires in a high-pressure, high-profile environment, with the intention of getting something better sorted when they have time.

And they didn't have time before the number of tests hit the limit of .XLS files.

The real failing here is of management and poor requirements planning, I wouldn't be too hard on the poor sods at the coalface who are trying to do 1001 things at once, with not enough support.

 

[marshbrewer]

My understanding is that the decision to use Excel was PHE's in *collating* the results from various labs, which is stupid, but they managed to double down on their incompetence by;

'It was suggested PHE used columns to log each case and that the maximum number had been reached – Excel has a 16,384 column limit – leading many to suggest it should instead have used rows for entries as Excel's row limit exceeds one million. Or that it should have used, you know, database software.'

 

[Chippy_Tea]

The number of people admitted to hospital with coronavirus on one day has jumped by a quarter in England.

There were 478 people admitted to hospital on Sunday - the largest daily figure since early June - up from 386.

More than two-thirds of those (334) were in the North West, North East and Yorkshire.

In total, nearly 2,800 patients are in hospital with Covid in England, compared with over 17,000 at the epidemic's peak.

In Scotland, 262 people confirmed to have Covid-19 are in hospital - a rise of 44.

In Wales, 92 admissions were recorded on the government's coronavirus dashboard - but that figure includes people who are suspected to have coronavirus, as well as those who have tested positive. There were no admissions in Northern Ireland.

The government's latest figures released on Tuesday show a total of 2,783 Covid-19 patients spent Monday night in England's hospitals - the highest daily total since 25 June.

There were also 349 patients in mechanical ventilation beds.

And latest hospital admissions figures released, for Sunday, show there were 478 new patients admitted - the highest daily figure since 3 June.

Extra restrictions have been introduced in many areas of the UK - including across the whole of Scotland and Northern Ireland.

On top of these national measures, parts of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and areas in the Midlands, Lancashire, Merseyside, West Yorkshire and the North East of England have seen additional rules imposed.

• Johnson lays out vision of post-Covid UK
• Sturgeon 'not proposing a return to full lockdown'

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said new coronavirus restrictions would be announced on Wednesday - but it will not be another full lockdown.

And households could be banned from mixing in Nottingham after a surge in cases, a city health official has said.

BBC News.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

My understanding is that the decision to use Excel was PHE's in *collating* the results from various labs, which is stupid, but they managed to double down on their incompetence

And that same article goes on to say that it wasn't that at all, they *were* using rows for entries - but were using .XLS which has a much lower row limit than .XLSX.

**** happens - an x on the end of the file extension and we wouldn't be talking about this. And I'd argue that using Excel is not as stupid as the alternative - a Government IT Project. Which would have ended up with IBM delivering a multi-£m supercomputer to collate some CSVs, some time in 2023.

The people on the ground just didn't have time for that, it's far better to hack something together in whatever tool is available to deliver something "now", and meanwhile get on with the 101 other jobs that needed doing yesterday.

It's easy to criticise from the passenger seat about what "should" have happened, but that's more a question of system specification and management rather than guys on the ground who are having to deal with the world as it is, not as one might want it to be.

 

[simon12]

Not really - blaming Bill Gates for this is like blaming the spade maker when someone tries to dig the Channel Tunnel with a spade.

What will have happened is that the people in the testing lab will have received a call at the last moment from PHE saying that they need the data, and whoever was most familiar with "coding" (probably some junior lab rat) will have used the tool they are most familiar with (Excel) to hack up something that's good enough to keep PHE happy whilst they go back to fighting 101 fires in a high-pressure, high-profile environment, with the intention of getting something better sorted when they have time.

And they didn't have time before the number of tests hit the limit of .XLS files.

The real failing here is of management and poor requirements planning, I wouldn't be too hard on the poor sods at the coalface who are trying to do 1001 things at once, with not enough support.

I was just making a joke about the gates conspiracies