The badly thought-out use of Microsoft's Excel software was the reason nearly 16,000 coronavirus cases went unreported in England. And it appears that Public Health England (PHE) was to blame, rather than a third-party contractor.

The issue was caused by the way the agency brought together logs produced by commercial firms paid to analyse swab tests of the public, to discover who has the virus. They filed their results in the form of text-based lists - known as CSV files - without issue.

PHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system and made available to the NHS Test and Trace team, as well as other government computer dashboards.

The problem is that PHE's own developers picked an old file format to do this - known as XLS. As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of. And since each test result created several rows of data, in practice it meant that each template was limited to about 1,400 cases. When that total was reached, further cases were simply left off.

Speaking in the House of Commons, the Health Secretary Matt Hancock suggested that the problem had emerged as a result of PHE using a "legacy system" and a decision had been taken two months ago to replace it. Presumably, however, this specific problem had not been spotted. Otherwise PHE would have realised that the flaw would come into effect before the upgrade was complete.

To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates. That should ensure none hit their cap.

But the current clunky system needs to be replaced by something more advanced that excludes Excel, as soon as possible.

Once again, the users are casting aspersions, towards the Software Packages, rather than at the idiots whom we pay to manage them.

You're absolutely right. You would have to ask why on earth they weren't using a database like Access for such important information. Spreadsheets are fine for small, simple, flat databases or tables but for something so important you would think they would be using something more suitable.

The pre 2007 version of Excel only has something like 65000 rows and 256 columns which is probably the reason they lost data. I am guessing that they continue using it because they are using VBA to import the csv information and the post 2007 version of Excel requires a .xlsm file rather than the default .xlsx file to run VBA.

You are right it is total idiocy and amazing that it took so long for someone to notice.