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Speaker 1: Pushkin, we will have a test track and trace operation

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Speaker 1: that will be world beating. That's Boris Johnson, the British

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Speaker 1: Prime Minister, speaking to Parliament with a typical jingoistic flourish

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Speaker 1: in May twenty twenty. The UK, he promised, would have

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Speaker 1: a world beating contact tracing system within a few days.

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Speaker 1: The first wave of the pandemic was slowly receding, but

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Speaker 1: the cost had been brutal. That spring, the country had

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Speaker 1: suffered one of the deadliest outbreaks of COVID anywhere in

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Speaker 1: the world, and so the British Prime Minister decided to

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Speaker 1: cheer up the nation as only he could, by boasting

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Speaker 1: of a contact trace system that would be better than

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Speaker 1: anything Johnny Foreigner would have. A contact tracing system for

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Speaker 1: COVID has three key elements. First, you need to be

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Speaker 1: able to identify who's infected and isolate them. Then you

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Speaker 1: need to trace the recent contacts of the infected person. Finally,

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Speaker 1: you need to be able to persuade those contacts to

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Speaker 1: isolate themselves as well to avoid any further spread. It's

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Speaker 1: not easy, but if you get it right, you can

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Speaker 1: keep the virus contained while allowing everyone else to relax

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Speaker 1: a little and go about their lives. Taiwan managed this,

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Speaker 1: so did South Korea and Vietnam and Japan. Anyway, the

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Speaker 1: UK system didn't need to beat the world, just needed

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Speaker 1: to beat the virus. In the summer of twenty twenty,

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Speaker 1: there seemed to be every chance of doing that. Infections

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Speaker 1: had been beaten back by a long, strict and lockdown.

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Speaker 1: Every day there was just a handful of deaths and

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Speaker 1: a quarter of a million. Daily tests were revealing just

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Speaker 1: a few hundred cases, surely few enough for the contact

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Speaker 1: tracers to manage. But by September there were alarming signs

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Speaker 1: that the virus was coming back. Cases rose. There were

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Speaker 1: a thousand a day, then two thousand, then three thousand.

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Speaker 1: The testing system was struggling to keep up. More than

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Speaker 1: ninety percent of people weren't getting test results back the

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Speaker 1: next day. There's not much point in contact tracing if

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Speaker 1: it takes days to even figure out who was infected.

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Speaker 1: And then on Sunday of the fourth of October, my

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Speaker 1: cell phone rang. On the line was a researcher from

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Speaker 1: the UK's most influential news program. She told me that

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Speaker 1: something very odd had happened and they wanted me to

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Speaker 1: figure it out and then come on the show the

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Speaker 1: next morning to help them explain it and what exactly

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Speaker 1: had happened. Nearly sixteen thousand positive cases had disappeared completely

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Speaker 1: from the contact tracing system. Sixteen thousand people who should

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Speaker 1: have been warned that they were infected and a danger

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Speaker 1: to others. Sixteen thousand cases in which the contact tracers

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Speaker 1: should be hurrying to figure out where that infected person went,

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Speaker 1: who they met, and who else might be at risk.

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Speaker 1: None of that was happening. And why had the cases disappeared? Well,

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Speaker 1: this was the real eye opener. Apparently Microsoft Excel had

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Speaker 1: run out of numbers. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening

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Speaker 1: to cautionary tales. You cannot see a crow in a

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Speaker 1: bowl full of milk. This is Francesco di Marco d'attini.

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Speaker 1: He's a textile merchant who lives near Florence in Italy.

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Speaker 1: I should probably tell you that courtesy of Iris Orego's

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Speaker 1: book The Merchant of Prato, I've taken you back in time.

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Speaker 1: It's thirteen ninety six and Dattini is furious you could

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Speaker 1: lose your weight from your nose to your mouth. What

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Speaker 1: was going on? Well, D'ttini's business associates were bungling the numbers.

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Speaker 1: It was a common enough problem for any businessman. At

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Speaker 1: the end of the thirteen hundreds, Italian commerce was becoming complicated.

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Speaker 1: Merchants were no longer mere traveling salesman able to keep

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Speaker 1: track of profits by patting their purses. They were in

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Speaker 1: charge of complex operations. The Teeney, for example, ordered wool

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Speaker 1: from the island of Mayorka two years ago before the

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Speaker 1: sheep had even grown. It That wool would eventually be

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Speaker 1: processed by numerous subcontractors before becoming beautiful rolls of dyed cloth.

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Speaker 1: The supply chain between shepherd and consumer ranged across Barcelona, Pisa, Venice, Valencia,

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Speaker 1: North Africa, even back to Mayorka itself. It would be

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Speaker 1: four years between the initial order of wool and the

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Speaker 1: final sale of cloth. No wonder, the Teeney insisted on

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Speaker 1: absolute clarity both about where the product was at any

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Speaker 1: moment and his money. How did he manage this simple spreadsheets?

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Speaker 1: The Teeny, of course, did not use Microsoft Excel back

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Speaker 1: in thirteen ninety six, but he did use its direct predecessor,

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Speaker 1: sheets of paper laid out according to the system of

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Speaker 1: double entry book keeping otherwise known as book keeping a

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Speaker 1: la vanetziana. In double entry book keeping, every entry is

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Speaker 1: made twice the clues in the name. For example, if

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Speaker 1: you spend a hundred florins on wool, that's recorded as

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Speaker 1: a credit of a hundred florins in your cash account

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Speaker 1: and the debit of a hundred florins worth of wool

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Speaker 1: in your assets account. This extra effort makes it much

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Speaker 1: easier to detect if a mistake has been made, the

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Speaker 1: books won't balance. Double entry bookkeeping became an essential method

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Speaker 1: for keeping track of who, of what to whom, foreign

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Speaker 1: exchange transactions, profits, losses, everything. It helped merchants such as

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Speaker 1: deteining ensure that, no matter how incompetent their associates, nothing

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Speaker 1: was lost. A century later, the master of double entry

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Speaker 1: bookkeeping was a man named Luca Paccioli. He was a

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Speaker 1: serious mathematician, a friend of Leonardo da Vinci, but he's

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Speaker 1: best known today as the most famous accountant who ever lived.

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Speaker 1: He literally wrote the book on the double entry method

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Speaker 1: back in fourteen ninety four. Paccioli once advised, if you

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Speaker 1: cannot be a good accountant, you will grope your way

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Speaker 1: forward like a blind man, and may meet great losses.

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Speaker 1: If you can't keep your spreadsheets straight, you may meet

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Speaker 1: great losses. Remember that. Let's jump forward nearly five hundred

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Speaker 1: years to nineteen seventy eight. We're at Harvard Business School

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Speaker 1: and a student named Dan Bricklin is sitting in classroom

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Speaker 1: watching his accounting professor filling in rows and columns on

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Speaker 1: the blackboard. The professor makes a change and then works

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Speaker 1: across and down the grid, erasing and rewriting other numbers

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Speaker 1: to make everything add up. This erasing and rewriting is

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Speaker 1: happening every day, millions of times a day, all over

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Speaker 1: the world, as accounting clerks adjust the entries in what

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Speaker 1: they call their spreadsheets, big sheets of paper spread across

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Speaker 1: two pages of an accounting ledger. Adjustments take a lot

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Speaker 1: of work. But Dan Bricklin was a computer geek, a

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Speaker 1: former programmer, who immediately thought, I can do this on

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Speaker 1: a computer. You would put a number in and hit return,

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Speaker 1: and everything would recalculate, and you could watch it. You

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Speaker 1: could watch the number change. Bomb bomb bomb, It made

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Speaker 1: a sound. I had a real prototype. The rest is history.

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Speaker 1: Bricklin and a friend called their spreadsheet program VisiCalc. It

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Speaker 1: went on sale on the seventeenth of October nineteen seventy nine.

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Speaker 1: It was a smash hit, soon followed by Lotus one,

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Speaker 1: two three, and then in due course by Microsoft Excel itself.

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Speaker 1: For accountance, digital spreadsheets were revolutionary, replacing hours of painstaking

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Speaker 1: work with a tap on a keyboard. But some things

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Speaker 1: did not change. Accountants still had their professional training and

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Speaker 1: their double entry system. But for the rest of us, well,

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Speaker 1: Excel became ubiquitous, an easily accessible tool, a flexible tool

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Speaker 1: like a Swiss Army penknife, sitting in your digital back pocket.

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Speaker 1: Any idiot could use it, and we did. Oh goodness me,

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Speaker 1: we did. Nobody really knows what happened to the fifteen thousand,

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Speaker 1: eight hundred and forty one positive COVID cases that disappeared

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Speaker 1: from the spreadsheet. Public Health England, a government agency responsible

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Speaker 1: for the process, hasn't published anything very informative on the issue.

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Speaker 1: I asked them about it. The suggestion that any cases

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Speaker 1: were lost is simply incorrect. Oh, no cases were missed.

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Speaker 1: There was a delay in referring cases for contact tracing

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Speaker 1: and reporting them in the national figures. That delay was

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Speaker 1: often four or five days. But experts will tell you

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Speaker 1: that you really need to track contacts within forty eight hours.

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Speaker 1: A five day delay renders the test results almost useless. Look, guys,

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Speaker 1: if you lose the positive cases for four or five days,

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Speaker 1: you lose them. But how did they lose them? Somewhere? Somehow?

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Speaker 1: Public Health England had used the wrong Excel file format

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Speaker 1: XLS rather than the more recent XLSX and XLS spreadsheets

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Speaker 1: simply don't have that many rows to to the power

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Speaker 1: of sixteen about sixty four thousand. That meant that during

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Speaker 1: some automated process cases had vanished off the bottom of

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Speaker 1: the spreadsheet and nobody had noticed. The idea of simply

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Speaker 1: running out of space to put the numbers was rather amusing.

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Speaker 1: The Fact that Microsoft was never anyone's idea of cool

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Speaker 1: simply added to the hilarity. Do you suffer from having

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Speaker 1: to organize and analyze a small set of numbers? Is

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Speaker 1: the undue function on a calculator frustrating the underpowered for

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Speaker 1: your calculations needs? Do you want to dabble in recreational mathematics,

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Speaker 1: then spreadsheets maybe for you. That's a satirical advert from

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Speaker 1: the comedy and mathematics YouTube channel Stand Up Maths. Please

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Speaker 1: speak to your database developer before deciding if spreadsheets is

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Speaker 1: right for you. Common side effects include accidentally sorting some

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Speaker 1: but not all of the data, slight cell loss when

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Speaker 1: selecting numbers, hashtag name, question mark, losing key medical data

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Speaker 1: during a pandemic and endangering lives, and being fired. Spreadsheet

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Speaker 1: is intended for short term use only. Stop using spreadsheets

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Speaker 1: if you find yourself in charge of a government database

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Speaker 1: with life and death ramifications. Spreadsheets from the makers of

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Speaker 1: word art. A few weeks after the data loss scandal,

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Speaker 1: by a strange twist of fate, I found myself able

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Speaker 1: to ask Bill Gates himself about what had happened. Bill

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Speaker 1: Gates no longer runs Microsoft, and I was interviewing him

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Speaker 1: about vaccines for a BBC program called How to Vaccinate

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Speaker 1: the World, but the opportunity to have a bit of

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Speaker 1: fun quizzing him about XLS and xlsx it's too good

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Speaker 1: to miss. I expressed the question in the nerdiest way possible,

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Speaker 1: and Gates's response was so straight laced I had to

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Speaker 1: smile to myself. Yeah, I guess the older format. You know,

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Speaker 1: they overran the sixty four thousand limit, which is not

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Speaker 1: there in the new format, So you know, it's good

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Speaker 1: to have people double check things, and I, you know,

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Speaker 1: I'm sorry that happened. Exactly how the outdated XLS format

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Speaker 1: came to be used is unclear. Public Health England sent

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Speaker 1: me an explanation, but it was rather vague. I didn't

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Speaker 1: understand it, so I showed it to some members of

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Speaker 1: use Brig, the European Spreadsheet Risks Group. They spend their

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Speaker 1: lives analyzing what happens when spreadsheets go rogue. They're my

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Speaker 1: kind of people. But they didn't understand what Public Health

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Speaker 1: England had told me either. It was all a little

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Speaker 1: light on detail. The basic problem was that whatever like

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Speaker 1: Health England had done wrong, they didn't have the right

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Speaker 1: checks and controls to flag up problems. But I can

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Speaker 1: just imagine what the merchant of Prato, Francesco DiMarco D'ttini,

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Speaker 1: might have said. You could lose your way from your

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Speaker 1: nose to your mouth. We'll explore how Excel became so

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Speaker 1: error prone after this message. Doctor Felina Herman's is a

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Speaker 1: researcher who studies spreadsheets. A few years ago, she realized

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Speaker 1: that there was a wonderful source of spreadsheets that she

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Speaker 1: could study in their natural habitat. That source was a

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Speaker 1: bankrupt energy company called Enron. Enron used to be huge,

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Speaker 1: but two decades ago it collapsed and various Enron executives

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Speaker 1: were convicted of financial crimes. Regulators extracted a large digital

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Speaker 1: pile of half a million emails from and run servers,

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Speaker 1: and those emails are publicly available. Importantly, for doctor Herman's,

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Speaker 1: thousands of those emails had spreadsheets attached. She started digging

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Speaker 1: through them. Looking at nearly ten thousand spreadsheets with calculations

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Speaker 1: in them, she found that a quarter of them had

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Speaker 1: at least one obvious error. The errors even seemed to multiply.

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Speaker 1: If a spreadsheet had any mistakes at all, on average,

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Speaker 1: it contained more than seven hundred and fifty How can

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Speaker 1: a spreadsheet acquire so many errors? I asked my friend

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Speaker 1: Matt Parker, the man who literally wrote the book about

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Speaker 1: mathematical mishaps and their consequences, a book with a delightful

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Speaker 1: title Humble Pie Imagine Cautionary Tales, only with more jokes

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Speaker 1: and more equations. One spreadsheet problem is simple human error.

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Speaker 1: For example, the time when candidates for a job in

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Speaker 1: policing were listed alongside a column containing their scores on

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Speaker 1: a test. When one column was resorted and the adjacent

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Speaker 1: one was not, the test scores were effectively scrambled all

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Speaker 1: the time that the investment bank JP Morgan lost six

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Speaker 1: billion dollars. And when I say lost, I mean they

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Speaker 1: lost the money, not that they misplaced it for five days.

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Speaker 1: They lost this six billion dollars after several spreadsheet errors,

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Speaker 1: notably one in which a risk indicator in a spreadsheet

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Speaker 1: was being divided not by an average of two numbers

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Speaker 1: but by their sum. That made the risks look half

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Speaker 1: as big as they should have done. But Excel is

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Speaker 1: happy to introduce errors without any help from US humans.

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Speaker 1: Matt Parker told me that one common set of problems

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Speaker 1: is produced by the auto correct function. Excel loves to autocorrect.

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Speaker 1: Type in an international phone number, and Excel will strip

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Speaker 1: off the leading zeros. They're mathematically redundant, but if you

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Speaker 1: want to make a phone call, you'll find that they're

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Speaker 1: not redundant at all. Or if instead you type in

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Speaker 1: a twenty digit serial number, Xcel will decide those twenty

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Speaker 1: digits are a huge quantity and round them off, turning

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Speaker 1: the last few digits into zeros. If you're a genetics

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Speaker 1: researcher typing in the name of a gene such as

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Speaker 1: march f one or sept in one are generally abbreviated

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Speaker 1: to march one or sept one. Well, you can imagine

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Speaker 1: what Xcel does with them. It turns those gene names

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Speaker 1: into dates, and one study estimated that twenty percent of

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Speaker 1: all genetics papers had errors caused by Xcel's autocorrection. Microsoft's

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Speaker 1: response to the genes problem is that Xcel's default settings

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Speaker 1: are intended to work in most day to day scenarios,

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Speaker 1: which is the polite way of saying, guys, Excel was

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Speaker 1: designed for accountants, not genetics researchers. But it's understandable that

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Speaker 1: scientists picked up Excel and started to use it. It's

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Speaker 1: right there on every computer. It's powerful, it's flexible, it's ubiquitous.

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Speaker 1: The problem with ubiquitous tools is that we tend to

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Speaker 1: use them even when they aren't the right tool for

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Speaker 1: the job, even when we don't really know what we're doing.

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Speaker 1: Come to think of it, especially when we don't know

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Speaker 1: what we're doing. I said earlier that Microsoft Excel is

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Speaker 1: like a Swiss army knife. As a boy, I was

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Speaker 1: absolutely fascinated by these beautiful little red multi tools, a

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Speaker 1: pen knife with a can opener and three kinds of screwdriver,

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Speaker 1: and a bottle opener, and a wire stripper and a

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Speaker 1: tiny saw and some tweezers and even a toothpick. What

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Speaker 1: a world of miracles and wonders. But as an adult

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Speaker 1: Gig struggles to put up a bookshelf straight even. I've

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Speaker 1: noticed something about people with practical skills, people such as plumbers, electricians,

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Speaker 1: and carpenters. They don't use a Swiss army knife. They

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Speaker 1: bring a toolkit with professional tools. Microsoft Excel is a

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Speaker 1: professional enough tool if you're an accountant. Excel wasn't designed

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Speaker 1: to run the entire contact tracing infrastructure of a wants

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Speaker 1: proud nation any more than a Swiss army knife was

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Speaker 1: designed to help you put up a set of shelves.

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Speaker 1: The experts I've spoken to have different views about the

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Speaker 1: deeper problem here. Some of them reckon that using Excel

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Speaker 1: itself for contact tracing was the original sin, that a

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Speaker 1: different sort of software tool, a database, would have been

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Speaker 1: much more appropriate. Others say no, if you use Excel

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Speaker 1: professionally with proper controls, it can easily handle the task

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Speaker 1: of contact tracing. And a well designed database would have

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Speaker 1: taken time to implement. XCEL was right there. Professional carpenters

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Speaker 1: don't use a Swiss army knife. But if the shelves

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Speaker 1: need to be put up immediately and you don't have

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Speaker 1: a toolbox, why not give the Swiss army knife a try.

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Speaker 1: You just have to be aware of its limitations and

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Speaker 1: perhaps to redo the job properly when you have the

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Speaker 1: tools to do so. Not long ago, I asked folks

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Speaker 1: on Twitter if they could recommend some good books about

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Speaker 1: the eradication of smallpox. Most people instead recommended books about

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Speaker 1: Edward Jenna back in seventeen ninety six, when he first

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Speaker 1: demonstrated an effective smallpox vaccine. That's revealing because I'd asked

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Speaker 1: about the eradication of smallpox, and smallpox wasn't eradicated in

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Speaker 1: seventeen ninety six, not even close. And while eradication would

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Speaker 1: have been impossible without a highly effective vaccine, it also

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Speaker 1: required highly effective use of information, or, as the merchant

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Speaker 1: Francesco di Marco d'atini might have said, it required not

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Speaker 1: losing your way from your nose to your mouth. Unlike COVID,

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Speaker 1: smallpox infections are easy to detect. For the awful reason

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Speaker 1: that smallpox does so much damage to the human body.

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Speaker 1: Bill Fagy, one of the leaders of the fight against smallpox,

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Speaker 1: says that you can even follow your nose. On at

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Speaker 1: least two occasions, smell alone alerted me to the presence

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Speaker 1: of small pox. As I walked down a hospital hallway

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Speaker 1: in India, the dead animal odor stopped me in my tracks.

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Speaker 1: Following the smell, I located a smallpox patient. Another time,

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Speaker 1: as I walked down an alley in an urban slim

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Speaker 1: in Pakistan, the same smell hit me. There are competing

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Speaker 1: smells in such places, but again one smells stood out.

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Speaker 1: Knocking on doors, I found two siblings with smallpox. Ever

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Speaker 1: since the vaccine for smallpox was demonstrated in seventeen ninety six,

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Speaker 1: people dreamed of eradicating the disease, but those dreams kept

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Speaker 1: failing to come true. The vaccinators would never manage to

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Speaker 1: reach quite enough people in poorer countries, smallpox would linger

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Speaker 1: in isolated rural communities or neglected slums. A generation of

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Speaker 1: babies would be borne without any immunity, and soon enough

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Speaker 1: the disease would be back. In the mid nineteen sixties,

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Speaker 1: smallpox was still killing two million people a year. This

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Speaker 1: was the same number as died of COVID. In twenty twenty,

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Speaker 1: the World Health Organization announced that it would redouble its

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Speaker 1: efforts to eradicate the disease, and it planned to do

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Speaker 1: so by intensifying the mass vaccination campaign. Bill Fegi was

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Speaker 1: part of those efforts to fight smallpox. Fegi would show

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Speaker 1: up in a village in eastern Nigeria, all six foot

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Speaker 1: seven of him, and the local elders would put out

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Speaker 1: the word come and see the tallest man in the world,

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Speaker 1: and people would come, and Bill Fegy reckons he wants vaccinated.

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Speaker 1: Eleven thousand, six hundred people in a single day. It

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Speaker 1: wasn't enough. Still, The outbreaks came late in nineteen sixty six.

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Speaker 1: Vegi received a radio message. This is a message for

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Speaker 1: doctor Fagi, A message for doctor Segy Veggie speaking what

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Speaker 1: is it? We'll hear that message and why information matters

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Speaker 1: if you want to eradicate smallpox. After the break, This

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Speaker 1: is a message for doctor Pegi. A message for doctor

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Speaker 1: Segy Veggie speaking what is it? The radio operator told

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Speaker 1: doctor Bill Fegi that there had been an outbreak of

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Speaker 1: smallpox in a village about one hundred miles away. He

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Speaker 1: traveled there, found five cases and vaccinated everyone they'd been

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Speaker 1: in contact with. The handy thing about the smallpox vaccine

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Speaker 1: is that it often still works even if you vaccinate

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Speaker 1: someone a few days after they've been exposed to the virus.

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Speaker 1: Standard practice then would be to vaccinate everyone for miles around,

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Speaker 1: but Vega's team just didn't have enough doses with them,

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Speaker 1: so instead he used radio and the local network of

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Speaker 1: missionaries to try to work out where to use the vaccine.

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Speaker 1: Every evening at seven o'clock they'd switch on the radio

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Speaker 1: and put the word out, this is doctor Bill Fegy

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Speaker 1: speaking here. Doctor Pegi, which send out and we have

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Speaker 1: all the information you requested. That's amazing news. So are

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Speaker 1: there any new cases? Cases were identified in just four

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Speaker 1: more villages. Vega and his team quickly raced to the

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Speaker 1: scene and administered the vaccine. The hope was that the

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Speaker 1: vaccines would act like a firebreak the disease wouldn't find

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Speaker 1: anyone to spread to, and it worked. Repeating the tactic,

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Speaker 1: Vega's team eliminated smallpox from eastern Nigeria within six months,

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Speaker 1: just in time for the catastrophic civil war of nineteen

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Speaker 1: sixty seven. Despite the chaos and enormous bloodshed of that war,

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Speaker 1: smallpox did not return. The secret to the success was

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Speaker 1: to worry less about the blanket coverage that was never

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Speaker 1: quite good enough, and worry more about quickly finding exactly

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Speaker 1: where each outbreak was. Eradication was all about information, and

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Speaker 1: up until that point information had been very patchy. As

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Speaker 1: the WHO teams looked more closely, they realized they were

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Speaker 1: missing the vast majority of the cases. Instead of one

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Speaker 1: hundred thousand cases a year around the world, there were

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Speaker 1: ten million. Public health workers could beat smallpox by figuring

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Speaker 1: out quickly where the outbreaks were and swiftly controlling the situation,

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Speaker 1: isolating people with the disease and vaccinating their contacts. The

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Speaker 1: strategy became known as a ring vaccination, and it has

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Speaker 1: a lot in common with COVID contact tracing. In both cases,

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Speaker 1: you need to rapidly isolate infected people and find their

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Speaker 1: recent contacts. Ring vaccination worked, and it didn't take long.

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Speaker 1: The last gasp of smallpox in the wild was in

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Speaker 1: Somalia late in nineteen seventy seven. Ali Mayaw Marlin, twenty

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Speaker 1: three years old, a cook and part time vaccinator, had

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Speaker 1: astonishingly not been vaccinated himself. One day, he was asked

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Speaker 1: for directions to the local hospital by a man driving

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Speaker 1: a jeep with two sick children in the back. Soon enough,

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Speaker 1: he started to feel unwell. He was wrongly diagnosed first

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Speaker 1: with malaria and then with chicken pox. He wasn't isolated

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Speaker 1: or treated until a friend of his, a nurse, made

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Speaker 1: the correct diagnosis. Ali had the awful smallpox. His ninety

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Speaker 1: one friends and contacts were isolated and vaccinated. None of

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Speaker 1: them contracted the disease. Ali himself recovered and devoted his

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Speaker 1: life to the fight against polio. I tell them how

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Speaker 1: important these vaccines are. I tell them not to do

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Speaker 1: something foolish like me. And the vaccines were important, essential

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Speaker 1: in fact, but so was quickly identifying and tracing contacts

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Speaker 1: at risk. Smallpox had survived nearly two centuries of vaccination,

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Speaker 1: but it couldn't survive a well run system that targeted

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Speaker 1: outbreaks and tracked potential cases with hindsight. It seems so

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Speaker 1: easy and simple in a way it was, But of

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Speaker 1: course keeping track of things is harder than it might

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Speaker 1: first appear. Francesco di Marco D'ttini could have told you

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Speaker 1: that so could Bill Gates. If you really want proof

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Speaker 1: that contact tracing works, how would you get it? If

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Speaker 1: you were a mad scientist, praised with power and unchained

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Speaker 1: by conventional ethics, You'd do an experiment. You'd hack into

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Speaker 1: a country's contact tracing system. Then you'd delete some of

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Speaker 1: the positive case, making sure that some regions lost a

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Speaker 1: lot of cases and some lost very few. Then you'd

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Speaker 1: compare what happened in the places where the contact tracing

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Speaker 1: system was still running smoothly to the places where thousands

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Speaker 1: of cases had gone missing. If you weren't an evil genius,

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Speaker 1: of course, you wouldn't dream of doing such a thing. Instead,

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Speaker 1: you'd keep an eye out for it happening by accident

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Speaker 1: because somebody bungled the formatting of Excel spreadsheets. Two economists,

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Speaker 1: Timo Fetzer and Thomas Graber did just that. They decided

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Speaker 1: that no catastrophe should be allowed to occur without trying

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Speaker 1: to learn some lessons, which is very much in the

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Speaker 1: spirit of cautionary tales. They combed through the evidence from

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Speaker 1: Public Health England's mishap, and by comparing the different experiences

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Speaker 1: of different regions, they concluded that the error had led

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Speaker 1: to one hundred and twenty five thousand additional infections. The

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Speaker 1: story about Excel running out of numbers just seemed so

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Speaker 1: funny at first. Do you suffer from having to organize

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Speaker 1: and analyze a small set of numbers? And Bill Gates's

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Speaker 1: straight faced, straight laced response seemed funny too. Yeah, I

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Speaker 1: guess the older format. You know, they overran the sixty

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Speaker 1: four thousand limit, which is not there in the new format.

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Speaker 1: You know, it's good to have people double check things,

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Speaker 1: and you know, I'm sorry that happened. But of course

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Speaker 1: it was Gates who'd seen through the joke on the

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Speaker 1: surface to what lay beneath. He wasn't laughing, not because

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Speaker 1: he had no sense of humor, but because he understood

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Speaker 1: that this wasn't a comedy. It was a tragedy. The

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Speaker 1: economists Fetza and Graber have calculated a conservative estimate of

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Speaker 1: the number of people who died unknown victims of the

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Speaker 1: spreadsheet error. They think the death toll is at least

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Speaker 1: fifteen hundred people. So the next time there's a pandemic,

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Speaker 1: let's make sure we have our spreadsheets in order. After all,

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Speaker 1: As Leonardo da Vinci's friend, the father of accounting, Luca

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Speaker 1: Paccioli warned us more than five hundred years ago, if

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Speaker 1: you cannot be a good accountant, you will grope your

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Speaker 1: way forward like a blind man and may meet great losses.

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Speaker 1: Fifteen hundred people dead, great losses indeed. Key sources for

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Speaker 1: this cautionary tale include Planet Money episode six h six, Spreadsheets,

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Speaker 1: Matt Parker's YouTube video whence Spreadsheets Attack, and Bill Feggy's

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00:32:15,090 --> 00:32:19,130
Speaker 1: book House on Fire. For a full list of our sources,

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Speaker 1: see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by

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Speaker 1: me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan

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Speaker 1: Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music

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Speaker 1: are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.

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Speaker 1: Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham,

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Speaker 1: Carter and Jeoffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi, Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge,

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Speaker 1: Rachel Hanshaw, cobnor Holbrook, Smith, Reg Lockett, Missiamunroe and Rufus Wright.

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Speaker 1: The show would not have been possible without the work

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Speaker 1: of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Hella Fane, John Schnarz, Carlie mcgliori,

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Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lakhan, and Maya Kane.

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Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you

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Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.