Your scenario makes it seem like these things are the result of incompetence or stupidity by people who aren't "decent coders". The reality is that for most use cases excel+manual processes are perfectly adequate/have little startup costs and what you're suggesting is grossly over engineered/require immense initial investment.
The real problem is if/when scope begins to increase these processes are sufficient until they aren't, and the tools aren't flexible enough to gracefully manage the transition.
>The real problem is if/when scope begins to increase these processes are sufficient until they aren't, and the tools aren't flexible enough to gracefully manage the transition.
That's a good point.
I'd also add that, at least in the US, we don't have any sort of national standard for such things.
Each public health department (and there are >1,000 of them in the US) has their own set of processes and procedures.
I'd expect that the CDC has a proper database system and that data from those 1000+ entities is collated into that system.
However, state and local laws/rules require specific handling of such data and can differ significantly from state to state, county to county or even town to town.
Attempting to stand up an integrated nationwide system isn't a bad idea. But doing so while trying to manage a pandemic isn't reasonable.
That many places used Excel spreadsheets for storing testing data is neither surprising or necessarily a bad thing. Until March, no one needed to have huge databases of test results -- now we do.
Complaining that places which had , at most, a few dozen cases of reportable infectious diseases should have implemented a database that can support thousands (tens of thousands?) of test results seems rather silly to me.
I didn't read the article posted until now, and I see it's about issues in the UK and not the US (I was confused, as we had issues with data reporting in the US as well).
My comment was focused on the decentralized US public health model and not on the UK's.
My apologies for injecting analysis of a different problem into this discussion. As such, my prior comment should probably be down-voted.
The real problem is if/when scope begins to increase these processes are sufficient until they aren't, and the tools aren't flexible enough to gracefully manage the transition.