Track and Trace, Disgrace

[Jenasaurus]

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/30/boris-johnsons-test-and-tracing-system-britain-lockdown?fbclid=IwAR1dD88epDykqQI2k3imKu2QurjVgNgeDXxPCUKsBhSt1GlY9l5zzxzGDHk

This is an anonymous report from one of the new team of test and tracers, they have no idea what they are doing and admit they are paid to basically do nothing.

Maybe you should ask Robert Jenrik how easy it is to make decisions that benefit Tory donors?

SERCO get 40% of its income from govt contracts, 200m for running 2 immigration centres awarded in february.

We have a well established public health system in this country, involving councils and GP's but Govt gave it to a large tory party donor... SERCO.... and with no local involvement and despite having months to get this system up and running, it still isn't and no app in sight, solely because we chose to develop our own.

What a disgrace. Why am I not surprised?

I disagree with outsourcing to the extent the government does, because it usually ends up costing more, can be carried out by existing staff or the service ends up being woefully inadequate without any proper contract management to recover losses, improve performance or terminate the contract. But it is really not a surprise that many, if not most, of the big companies have a lot of Tory donors, due to the fact that they're wealthy, and feel it's in their best interest to vote for them. Again, not disputing their likely is corruption, but if all of these companies (which they likely do) have a lot of Tory donors then of course whoever is awarded something will have Tory donors. Serco aren't anything to do with the app in fairness, but I think you might be underestimating the amount of work and the usual timescales for development and implementation of something like this; another reason we should have gone for one which already exists.

People are confusing the 'app' and the Contact Tracing Advisory Service (CTAS). The app is not live, it has been tested in the Isle of Wight and work is ongoing to fix the issues raised through the test period. In my opinion the app is an interesting white elephant that should only ever have been a ' nice to have' addition to a proper well managed, contact tracing service.

CTAS is the manual contact tracing service where call agents will contact people that have testers positive, give advice and support about isolating and collect their onward contacts (exposures). The exposed contacts are then also contacted, assessed, given the relevant advice and sent for testing if necessary. It is the CTAS service that is key to safely leaving lockdown and managing the virus moving forwards. We are woefully late trying to set this up and signs so far are that it is indeed a shambolic mess. There is no new system to blame here just incompetent management and lack of attention being paid to what should the most crucial part of our national Covid response.

In contrast to many other areas, little attention have been paid to the technology needed to make this service work. What has been put in place is a cobbled together mess of existing systems that were never intended to scale up to manage a national pandemic and consequently are not coping.

There has also been a blatant disregard of the end to localise service offerings to enable support to be provided to those that need it. Skilled local resources have been ignored in favour of big contracts with call centre companies. It is a disgrace.