£37,000,000,000 for still failing test and trace

[Tilltheend99]

Am I being UR to think that £37,000,000,000 for a system that doesn’t work is unreasonable? Test and trace have just been given top up funds by the government to “…the equivalent of 20% of the entire NHS budget.” Plus ‘consultants’ still being paid £1000 a day.

Just to be clear I think we should have test and trace but that it should work, help to reduce the rate of infections, and cost a hell of a lot less!
metro.co.uk/2021/10/27/test-and-trace-failed-its-main-objective-despite-37-billion-cost-15492287/

@poshme

Would you like to start paying for LFT and PCR tests? Where do you think the money for them comes from?

It doesn't have to be one or the other, the contracts are bringing in nice profits for the firms involved otherwise they wouldn't bother doing them. If testing for covid is going to be a thing for a while, investing in bringing the capability in house is more efficient than throwing a load of money at an ineffective and now largely pointless system.

@RandomLondoner

The people I'm angry with are the ones who 18 months ago were having a go at the government for not successfully doing test and trace. I suspected that the reason it wasn't being done was because it wasn't possible to do. The government caved in to pressure and threw a lot of money at something they knew probably could not deliver much value.

In my mind the people who are complaining about the waste are the same mob who triggered it in the first place. It's possibly a fallacy that it's always the same people who are complaining about the government, but I suspect not.

Other countries have managed it, with some foresight they could have sorted something before it became more urgent. We had to do our own thing, 'world beating' remember, instead of signing on to use an app and tech that others were already using and would be substantially cheaper. We have invested fuck all in the sciences the past decade too so of course we didn't have the facilities ourselves, but let's blame rational people who quite rightly wondered why we didn't have access to something most other developed countries had.

T&T were a big reason I didn’t get a pcr when I knew I had Covid (dh and dd already had positives). Moronic long phone call (almost a hour) which resulted in them emailing me the info I just told them. Which was a duplicate of the info dh had told them earlier. A person muttering a script that was inaudible.

The only service that is of any use is testing. This tracing business is a complete joke. Most of us are capable of contacting the people who we recently saw (or the school).

My son spent the summer holidays working at a testing site as an agency worker. He's quids-in for minimal work, and as this was a reactive service, he managed to watch most of his football team's matches, streamed on his laptop whilst sitting around. He's doing Economics at uni and it's given him a good understanding of how public money can be spent.

And yet people still vote for them. If there was a general election tomorrow they would still be in power. Its madness, utter madness.

@Florianus

One of the main areas of waste by Track and Trace has been the employment of 2,300 management consultants at an average salary of £163,000 a consultant, panning out to between £1000 and £7000 a day. I have never seen any explanation of what these people do. When asked, Dido Harding just vaguely claimed that "they’ve done very important work alongside the public servants, the military, the healthcare professionals and members of the private sector who have come and joined us as well,”

I am not defending this enormous spend, but I do want to point out that it's wrong to think that these consultants are going home each day £1000+ richer, while working alongside NHS workers on considerably less. The per day figure is how the contract with the consultancy is priced. Many of those consultants are on a considerably lower salary, but the consultancy charges £xxxx per day for their work. It's that difference between what a consultant is actually paid and what they can be priced at that gives the consultancies such enormous profits.

Other countries have managed it

There have been a number of comparative studies of track and trace systems around the world, appearing in publications from Nature to the Guardian. None in the West have worked well - the UK only managed to identify an average of 2 contacts per infection, France managed just 1.4 while in parts of the USA it was an average of less than 1. Even in Germany, T&T failed to prevent two lockdowns.

The only countries in which T&T was successful were those in the Far East with populations that accept governments exercising close control over people by accessing their phone records, data from credit cards and CCTV, information from Facebook and Instagram posts, and credit card data, to trace their movements . Personal information is then broadcast online as a warning to others. Such intrusion would never have been acceptable in the West, where many people think it is no business of government to log where they have been, and where many don't reveal their contacts because they don't want to dob their friends and relatives into quarantine.

@Florianus something tells me that 37 billion quid, spent the right way, could've got through some of those barriers. If they even really existed. There has been plenty of compliance throughout the UK, or else we'd have the US stats. Where compliance was an issue, money should have been spent. Instead it has immeasurably enriched the coffers of some already wealthy crooks, of the kind that hide in plain sight and rely on string pulling and right wing media obfuscation to pull it all off.

There needs to be a petition to abolish trace and track and make them pay the millions of pounds wasted back

Because petitions work so well.

@RandomLondoner - that's exactly how current Tory messaging works. Don't blame them for anything. If possible blame the people.

The government caved in to pressure and threw a lot of money at something they knew probably could not deliver much value.

The fact it worked out so well for Crony party donors seems a little too convenient for that to be true.

When there is an eventual enquiry, I think they'll find that the failure to cover the costs of self isolation in full (which can be everything from lost income, to the logistics - who walks the dog or cares for your elderly relative when you're stuck at home?) will turn out to be a major cause of transmission.

I decided not to get tested (sole exemption: visiting relative in a care home). I programmed the phone numbers of T&T into my phone so I knew not to pick up. I gave fake details when I went to the pub. I told friends not to name me to T&T.

Why? I'm self employed. I can't earn a penny without leaving the house. I also can't get sick pay - not even SSP - so if I'm well enough to stand up I'm well enough to work. My business was severely affected by lockdown, but I wasn't eligible for SEISS, furlough or UC. I have a dog who needs walking, and because he has behaviour issues he can't be taken by a well meaning volunteer. Professional walking for 10 days would be £140 of extra costs caused solely by T&T. I'd have to pay for supermarket deliveries - extra delivery fees and no timing my supermarket visits for the best yellow sticker reductions.

I wouldn't get the £500 guaranteed payment because I'm not on UC, and don't trust the discretionary one. Even if I did get it, it wouldn't cover my basic living expenses + business overheads for 10 days.

I'd suffer the inconvenience of self isolation, but I'm not pushing myself into poverty to do it when they've spent £37bn on this system.

SAGE has been talking about this issue for a long time by the way.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/06/covid-tests-proper-support-self-isolation

[quote baroqueandblue]**@Florianus* something tells me that 37 billion quid, spent the right way, could've got through some of those barriers. If they even really existed. There has been plenty of compliance throughout the UK, or else we'd have the US stats. Where compliance was* an issue, money should have been spent. Instead it has immeasurably enriched the coffers of some already wealthy crooks, of the kind that hide in plain sight and rely on string pulling and right wing media obfuscation to pull it all off.[/quote]
I don't think that tracing would ever have worked well in the West, however much was spent. People in Europe and the USA simply think that the Far Eastern approach is unacceptably intrusive. Countries such as South Korea were posting personal details to people's families and neighbours. In some cases, wives were informed that their husbands had picked up the virus in brothels, while a man and his sister-in-law were suspected of having an affair, simply because covert tracing revealed that they had lunched together,

Compliance in the UK produced 2 contacts for each infected person. It was something like 17 in South Korea because relatives and neighbours were named and shamed, while in Vietnam some 200 contacts were traced from one infection in some cases - and the whole lot then forced into quarantine whether they were infected or not. The Chinese even padlocked the doors to entire blocks of flats to ensure that contacts did not leave.

Governments in the West knew that their populations would never accept such intrusive methods.

When there is an eventual enquiry

Why would there be an enquiry ? All it takes is a vote in parliament to prevent it, and job done. You'll never see this shower of shits daring to go against the golden Boris. No matter how big they talk.

@DGRossetti

When there is an eventual enquiry

Why would there be an enquiry ? All it takes is a vote in parliament to prevent it, and job done. You'll never see this shower of shits daring to go against the golden Boris. No matter how big they talk.

An inquiry is due to start in the Spring

www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57085964.amp

An inquiry is due to start in the Spring

sorry, I have an AI filter on my browser (similar to AdBlock) and it stopped at this:

Boris Johnson has promised