A total of 15,841 COVID-19 cases were recently not reported in the U.K., Public Health England announced Sunday, and it seems Microsoft Excel was to blame — along with a dash of human error.

PHE said that from Sept. 25 to Oct. 2, those cases were not reported in the daily figures announced to the public. It was later revealed that a “technical issue” had occurred when the Excel spreadsheet used to tally the figures ran out of space.

The U.K. authorities said that after a speedy investigation, the error was fixed, but what has troubled netizens is the fact that a large number of people were not informed they had come into contact with the positive cases. That would have happened had they been correctly added to the database.

“The problem is that the PHE developers picked an old file format to do this — known as XLS,” wrote the BBC. “As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the 1 million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.” It’s now reported that the data had been portioned off into smaller Excel batches.

The incident comes at a time when the U.K. is experiencing a rising number of cases and with it more stringent lockdowns. The public’s trust in the government has been waning for some time and the recent gaffe hasn’t helped matters.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs that only 51% of cases have now been contacted a second time for contact tracing purposes, adding that the good news is that care homes, schools and hospitals were not directly affected.

“This incident should never have happened, but the team have acted swiftly to minimize its impact,” said Hancock. “And now it is critical that we work together to put this right, and to make sure it never happens again.”

Labor Party Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth said that the mistake had put lives at risk, adding that there are “thousands blissfully unaware” that they might have bumped up against someone carrying the virus.

Photo: Michael Coghlan/Flickr