Member-only story
You can’t blame a “computing issue” for the Covid cock-up, Boris. Computers don’t make errors.
The British government is very keen to find anyone to blame for its failure to tame Coronavirus: the ‘complacent’ British public, the opposition, now it’s picking on my mates: computers.
Over the weekend, it was revealed that almost 16,000 positive Covid-19 test results went missing from computer systems, resulting in many more thousands of contacts not being told to self-isolate as quickly as they should have. A monumental cock-up that has the very real possibility of costing lives.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson was quick to apportion blame. On Sunday morning’s Andrew Marr Show he labelled the blunder a “computing issue”, implying it was something beyond human control.
He was at it again at Prime Minister’s Questions today in the Commons, when challenged on the blunder by the Leader of the Opposition. “You can’t have it both ways,” Boris retorted to the criticism. “You can’t call it a human error and a basic Excel error.”
Oh, yes you can. Because computers simply aren’t capable of making errors by themselves.
What went wrong?
First, a brief explanation of what went wrong. According to the BBC, the testing data was stored in a format called Comma…
