Centralisation in Britain of public health and of testing has not worked well
Also public service cuts:
even 10 years ago there were 10,000 public health officers, but during reorganisation and creation of PHE, this was cut to only a few hundred.
The UK decided in March to abandon t&t, because they only had the capacity to track about 50 cases
Since resuming t&t this summer, it has been the small number of professional public health officers who have successfully tracked most of the contacts found,
not the thousands of barely trained new staff at call centres, who have been given little work.
A 29 June government report said 114,000 people had been contacted by that date:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53220180
"But the vast majority of these were found by existing public health teams.
An investigation by BBC Panorama has discovered that 98,000 of the contacts were traced by only 870 public health officials.
The local officials work for Public Health England and are experts in contact tracing.
They are responsible for managing more complex cases, like outbreaks in schools and care homes, which often reveal larger numbers of contacts.
At the start of the coronavirus outbreak, a report written by Public Health England for the government's SAGE group of advisers called for a ten-fold increase in contact tracing capacity.
Public Health England has told Panorama that the number of public health officials has only been increased from 380 to 870."
In Germany, track & trace has always been a local responsibility, but Germany is very decentralised:
the 16 states have considerable autonomy and at the level below there are 401 administrative districts
There are tens of thousands of public health officers, who know their own patch and residents
The network of 300 test labs report data locally as well as automatically notifying the RKI (federal public health authority)
This local knowledge has been a big factor in why track & trace worked so well here from the start.
There is an App running, but this is just an extra tool for the the local officers
They phone, text, Email or visit contacts - the personal touch plus legal powers makes them very effective