“You don’t need a computer, let alone one with 75,000 processor cores, to think about the parts of a problem”

While the headlines make it seem that Excel was to blame for the Public Health England scandal, Steve believes the problems go far deeper

STEVE CASSIDY

If there ever was a bigger computing scandal than Public Health England’s handling of the pandemic statistics in late 2020, I’ve not heard of it. If you’ve been held in solitary confinement and missed the story, British health researchers miscounted the number of cases, leading to policymaker confusion and headlines about “extra deaths”. The problem, it turned out, was Excel. To be more precise, the incoming data looked perfectly good when opened in Excel but, in reality, was far from it. This came as quite a shock to me as I followed the story in autumn 2020, because over the past few years I’ve witnessed several exemplary supercomputer projects in the medical arena, all devoted to improving understanding and efficiency in the treatment of diseases and disorders. All these projects have featured…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2021

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