Heather & Gorse

H and I went for a walk in the Country Park and edge of the Lowes this morning. A bit of a hitch at the start as the car park we had arranged to meet in was taped off as they were dealing with fallen trees from the  storm a week or so ago. Several paths were also taped off on our walk. This afternoon I dug out a shrub and rhubarb whilst the builders re-did the work filling the 3 cracks in my concrete driveway. The original repair cracked the day they did it, probably because it was the hottest day of the year and it dried out too quickly. Tennis now. 

Day 204 / Full Day 196 of Lockdown / Day 22 of Rule of Six (for my record only)
UK deaths up 19 to 42,369 (revised basis), with a 12,594 rise in new daily cases, and 2,428 patients in hospital. Words fail me on the cock up of not reporting 15,841 new cases. It turns out that as well as not being reported, they also didn't get passed to Test and Trace and even now nearly 8,000 haven't had their contacts traced. I didn't highlight the falling case no's as the press did as they looked so odd - cases were rising steadily and then dropped 41% in 3 days. Dippy Dido should be looking at the data every day as part of her oversight and should have picked this up and questioned it, as should the managers below her. Even now the day with the lowest numbers is showing as having zero missing cases when all days around it did have missing cases. Then it turns out that this critical data is being compiled on Excel spreadsheets! If data is that important and/or involves the transfer of large volumes of data, then a proper database should be used, built and tested by IT experts, ideally with direct feeds of data from the labs and definitely not using an 'end user computing' solution, particularly on old IT infrastructure and an old version of Excel / an out of date file format. And where were the basic End User Computing controls? Evidently the 'solution' has been to chop the input files into smaller files - unbelievable! I don't know if this data was also missing from the app, but I have heard one report of a flat mate testing positive not resulting in an alert. Evidently one impact for decision making is that the growth rate has gone from being below the French and Spanish trajectories to above them.

Manchester's infection rate has more than doubled in 7 days, on R4 the speaker was saying that the rate of growth of the virus in students in MCr was nearly 6 times that in the general population. A quarter of Odeon cinemas are now only going to open at weekends. President Trump says that he is leaving hospital later today and tweets 'Don't be afraid of Covid'.