Day 249: Neo-Neo-Neovisicide

The reprieve for Danish mink has been called off, and now they're getting even more culled than the unfortunate Dutch mink. Besides recovered mink at infected farms, they're also culling every mink on farms within 5 miles of any infected farm, because somehow they pose a threat to humans. PlagueBlog hopes they don't kill all the human patients in hospitals within five miles of an infected hospital.

In England, the recent underreporting of 16,000 COVID cases has been traced to...Microsoft Excel:

Public Health England (PHE) collected data from commercial firms that analysed the swab results to see who tested positive or not, and receved the information in files with the values separated by commas.

Using comma separated values (CSV) in files is common practice for handling data.

PHE loaded the files into Microsoft Excel spreadsheet templates to be entered into a central system used for government contact tracing and reporting dashboards.

However, the PHE developers used the original binary .XLS file format for Excel which first appeared in 1987.

[...]

BBC reported that thanks to the old file format being used, each Excel template was limited to recording around 1400 cases.

Any further cases than that were ignored by template, and led to 15,841 going unreported between September 25 and October 2 which may have led to people being unaware of COVID-19 exposure in that time.

Massachusetts' cases are up about a third of a percentage point today. In other local news, Falmouth High School went virtual yesterday after an unknown number of virtually immune students "attended a party this weekend in Woods Hole while not wearing masks and not practicing physical distancing." As usual there was much hand-wringing from the puritan administrators of the school.