Issues between smoke test and normal submission

We had a try: except: clause that ran fine in the smoke test but when it ran during the normal submission the same clause caused the submission to fail, what might be the cause of this issue?

That’s an extremely broad question, but generally speaking: you’re not treating all dates and all sites the same way. For example, you could have missing data for some dates and some sites. The smoke tests were only run against a subset of the full data: something about the issue dates and sites not covered in the smoke test is the culprit.