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The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

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Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#81

Post by samhw »

jsmith99 wrote: post #27
one-more-minute wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general the gov.uk website is stellar. Lots of good info, and plenty of thought has gone into making everything clear, accessible and pleasing to the eye. Things generally work in a way that they really don't on most public org websites. The team behind it blog a fair bit about how they've made these things happen. https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk The only downside is that they often send you to sites run by other,…

They had an early win getting a effective and consistent UI accross government sites, but digitising the underlying processes is a work in progress. Once you click that beautiful and accessible green submit button, it's not impossible a printer in Swansea whirs to life to print your answers out into the original paper form.

> it's not impossible a printer in Swansea whirs to life to print your answers out into the original paper form

Speaking of which: my mum went through the form to renew her Oyster card the other day, and, having finally completed it, it generated a PDF form and told her to print it out and take it to the Post Office.

So yeah, there are definitely some Jira tickets still on the left.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#82

Post by greatgib »

sdoering wrote: post #45
greatgib wrote: post #41

First, when you see public officials doing a blog post on "Microsoft.com" website instead of on a public website, you know that something fishy is going on... On the other side, I have the feeling that this thing that clearly over-engineered. Just look at data their diagram... If I'm not wrong there is one writer and multiple reader for the data, or at least multiple writers on one side and multiple readers on anothe…

> First, when you see public officials doing a blog post on "Microsoft.com" website instead of on a public website, you know that something fishy is going on... The article states it was written by Claire Giordano from San Francisco. Not sure where you got the UK Government official from. To me it read like a b2b marketing piece and showcase. Kind of: We can power this, so we can power your BI dashboard as well. Taki…

Indeed I did not check the bio of the article writer, but when you read:

>

You don't expect the gov UK dashboard to be done us consultants...

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#83

Post by Closi »

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #35
Closi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government was tracking key health metrics and sharing them at the point Dom was talking about using his iPhone. For instance on the same date, the government did it's first daily briefing and shared infection and death metrics with the public (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51901818 ). Tracking key health metrics and sharing those metrics with the public doesn't mean that there is modelling about the extent t…

From watching his testimony I believe Cummings was disappointed that this 'data system' wasn't available before the pandemic, precisely because that few week delay putting one together meant everything.

> I believe Cummings was disappointed that this 'data system' wasn't available before the pandemic, precisely because that few week delay putting one together meant everything.

It's very easy to say that something should have been there after the fact, and harder to build a system for an unknown-threat before you have any clear requirements.

It's also not clear to me what data a 'data system' would have provided that would have meaningfully changed any policy (and if it didn't affect policy, I'm not sure how it can 'mean everything').

What data did the government not have in March 2020 that they could have collected with some sort of pre-built 'data system'? In reality the bigger issue in understanding the situation at the time was that we couldn't identify all the covid cases anyway because there wasn't enough test resource - it wasn't the lack of a 'data system'.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#85

Post by foepys »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #76
smarx007 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the 3 different (non-trivial) APIs they are offering on top of the dashboard? Though I have a hard time understanding why use PostgreSQL instead of ClickHouse, for example.

No I didn’t tbh, I didn’t read much further. Notice how one sentence says Postgres was chosen because it was somebody’s preference

You will always be faster with worse tools you know than with better tools you don't know.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#86

Post by lloydatkinson »

foepys wrote: post #85
lloydatkinson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I didn’t tbh, I didn’t read much further. Notice how one sentence says Postgres was chosen because it was somebody’s preference

You will always be faster with worse tools you know than with better tools you don't know.

True but why does it also need terabytes of storage and 12 worker nodes?

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#87

Post by codefined »

mmcnl wrote: post #43
trebligdivad wrote: post #5

I do wonder if the power of a distributed database is really needed here; it gets ~1 update a day, so there's no need to have clever consistency stuff. Most of the queries relate to either today's data (you open the map and zoom in to see how doomed your area is today), or the graphs showing a standard set of history (e.g. cases over the last year). You'd think you could extract that data to be static and not require…

I agree. For example, the Dutch corona dashboard (coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl) is a statically rendered dashboard using Next that gets updated daily. No backend and it's super fast. Maybe I'm not objective because I'm Dutch myself, but from both a user-facing and technical perspective I think the Dutch dashboard is by far the best corona dashboard in the world. It's very fast, has a lot of detailed visualization…

Looking at the Dutch site on my phone (Samsung S10) I noticed it took a little while to load compared to the nigh instant loading of the UK Gov variant. Looking at Page Insights [0] [1] tells a similar picture. Desktop time to interactive times of 0.4s Vs 3.5s and Mobile time to interactive times of 4.5s Vs 13.1s.

The Dutch website seems to spend a lot of that time running the Next JS framework stuff, which the Gov.uk variant does not. It might work quickly on fast computers, but even on modern phones it seems to visibly pause.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#88

Post by YZF »

trebligdivad wrote: post #5

I do wonder if the power of a distributed database is really needed here; it gets ~1 update a day, so there's no need to have clever consistency stuff. Most of the queries relate to either today's data (you open the map and zoom in to see how doomed your area is today), or the graphs showing a standard set of history (e.g. cases over the last year). You'd think you could extract that data to be static and not require…

To add to this the scale of the data is presumably quite small as well. The geographical resolution is probably not super fine, there's only a handful of different kinds of data (deaths, vaccination whatnot) and the time resolution doesn't have to be too fine either (a day?). Even if you wanted to query it in very sophisticated ways you wouldn't need a database.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#89

Post by vidarh »

notahacker wrote: post #71
discordance wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious how many students and faculty at your university are served by that $2m/year? I don’t disagree with you, but if I were the CTO of a 10000+ seat organization, and a Microsoft/Google/etc told me they could provide email, storage, sharing/collaboration, office apps, security etc for a few bucks per user / month… that’s a pretty compelling deal.

And the idea of a university rolling its own office apps suite to provide local employment sounds like the sort of decision likely to end up in tears, or at least in students relying on Excel and Word on their own computers anyway

Most people wouldn't end up with rolling their own, but contracting existing support providers or developers.

E.g. for Excel and Word replacements there is LibreOffice, and any number of companies offer more polished packaged up LibreOffice variants and surrounding services. One example is Collabora in the UK[1]. In that respect the effect would be to shift revenue that currently mostly leaves Europe to companies closer to home.

The biggest hindrance is that if you do too much of that and you'll get the US and others doing the same thing in return, whether in the same sectors or entirely different sectors.

[1] https://www.collaboraoffice.com/

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#90

Post by rob_c »

rob_c wrote: post #21
intricatedetail wrote: post #9

Quoted post unavailable.

Yes. This was never pure ONS data. It was always processed/massaged/tampered with. Although horrifyingly it did allow you to gauge the Westminster mindset and understand what Draconian measures they were planning to introduce sightly ahead of time because the data would have to reflect this when lord Boris got up on the podium...

Despite the downvotes the only incorrect statement here is that Boris has a lordship. Go export the ONS data yourself and analyse it unless your too lazy to see what I mean
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