£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
But all of those things could have been achieved with the ONS study, even the genomic sequencing and testing for variants could have been achieved at a tenth of the cost with an enhanced ONS study.
The testing system is probably the worst value for money of any recent government programme. I don't think that's a controversial point.
If we scaled up the ONS studies to the size of T&T then many of the same problems would have arisen.
One of my daughter's friends was employed by T&T. She had so little work to do that she eventually quit out of boredom. It was not efficient. No government program of that scale is ever going to be. It was stupid not to take isolation more seriously. It was absolutely urgent and built from scratch remarkably quickly.
Worth mentioning that ComRes had the worst result by far in 2019.
ComRes and ICM were in approximately the same place, but the point is taken nonetheless. If one had to pick between the recent ComRes and YouGov figures as an indicator of where opinion lies at the moment, the YouGov would seem the more plausible.
On topic: the betting markets must be factoring in the possibility of high structural unemployment and all the nasty decisions the Government has to make about tax and spending when this is all over. There's a very long way to go until the next election, but demographic change, the Scottish situation and Labour's shrunken voter coalition all favour the Tories. Another Conservative victory has to be the odds-on favourite in all of this, and where Labour is meant to conjure an overall majority from Lord alone knows.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that?
We're phasing out our lockdown, Europe are not. We have an end in sight, Europe do not.
Not £38bn worth of benefits, the much cheaper ONS weekly study achieves the same thing at the fraction of the cost. Without a proper monitored isolation programme the testing system was always going to have marginal value in bringing the R value down. It's just an extremely expensive near real time version of the ONS study.
That's not the fault of Test & Trace, there was no political will at all for a draconian isolation programme. i.e. Force people to isolate under threat of a severe penalty.
There was no (or wildly insufficient) support available even to those willing to isolate voluntarily. An oversight that cost us £billions & seems incomprehensible from the outside.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
But T&T hasn't done anything of the sort, it's lengthened the pandemic by months because it doesn't have any kind of serious isolation system and we've pissed £38bn away on it.
Once they spent billions on the app they forgot to spend millions incentivising people to comply with it
The main problem with test and trace is that they ran it with the wrong targets.
The target it was run with was Johnson's pledge to test 100,000 people a day. So we have a system that can test huge numbers of people every day and it's very successful at that.
But the target should have been to prevent onward transmission by isolating as large a proportion of infectious people for as large a proportion of the time that they are infectious as possible. We have no idea precisely how useless it was at that because the government isn't even attempting to measure that.
Even lockdown decisions have been made on the basis of hospital admissions, rather than the testing numbers, so it's not had any utility there in acting in advance of problems.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
But T&T hasn't done anything of the sort, it's lengthened the pandemic by months because it doesn't have any kind of serious isolation system and we've pissed £38bn away on it.
No its not done anything of the sort.
You're contrasting test and trace with some fictionalised "serious isolation system" that you have been an advocate of from the beginning but that fictionalised system didn't exist here or anywhere else in the West. That's got nothing to do with test and trace whatsoever, that's to do with the country not having the willpower to take isolation as seriously as you wanted.
If the pandemic is lengthened then please name a European or properly equivalent to the UK country that ended the pandemic months before us?
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that?
We're phasing out our lockdown, Europe are not. We have an end in sight, Europe do not.
Good luck to anyone going out to meet a single friend outdoors, today!
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that?
We're phasing out our lockdown, Europe are not. We have an end in sight, Europe do not.
That is 100% the vaccine and 0% T&T.
Why do you think T&T suddenly has anything to do with it, after months of achieving nothing?
I don't think the general public are going to be interested in the nuance of the difference between money spent on testing, the money spent on tracing, and the money spent on vaccines.
It will all go into the "money spent on beating covid" pot, which will be met by a shrug at worst or a cheer at best.
Labour shouldn't waste their time on this in my opinion.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
But T&T hasn't done anything of the sort, it's lengthened the pandemic by months because it doesn't have any kind of serious isolation system and we've pissed £38bn away on it.
No its not done anything of the sort.
You're contrasting test and trace with some fictionalised "serious isolation system" that you have been an advocate of from the beginning but that fictionalised system didn't exist here or anywhere else in the West. That's got nothing to do with test and trace whatsoever, that's to do with the country not having the willpower to take isolation as seriously as you wanted.
If the pandemic is lengthened then please name a European or properly equivalent to the UK country that ended the pandemic months before us?
T&T completely failed because it tried to do the impossible while being led by someone who was completely clueless.
One is "My Truth", as use by Oprah. To me that means "My Opinion".
Another was on R4 earlier - the idea that a personal account of a personal experience is beyond question, and must be accepted as revealed truth. To me - that's just a no; of course it must be tested, especially when not self-consistent.
I'll have a bash. I like these sort of convoluted linguistic issues.
It means my take rather than my opinion. The substitution of "truth" for "take" is a suitable innovation for where it's a person talking about how something has affected them, how it's come across, made them feel, this sort of thing. Because here it requires and deserves added weight over and above "take". And certainly "opinion" is not right.
To illustrate: Woman describes how she feels belittled herself when male colleagues talk about female celebs in an objectified and contemptuous manner.
That is not "her opinion", it is "her take". But "her take" is not quite strong enough. It makes it sound as if her offering on the matter is just one of many to be considered equally. We need something to elevate it. Her Truth. It works.
Question begged. What about the men in my example? One of them now gives his side, says it's not that often, and we talk about lots of other things, she's being a snowflake etc. So is that His Truth?
Answer: No. It isn't. That (rightly) stays at the level of "his take". Why? Because His (or Her) Truth is restricted to those who are punching up. Or not punching, just explaining in this case, but you know what I mean.
So, with the Meghan interview, I'd say there was a hotchpotch of her opinions, her takes, and her truths.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that?
We're phasing out our lockdown, Europe are not. We have an end in sight, Europe do not.
That is 100% the vaccine and 0% T&T.
Why do you think T&T suddenly has anything to do with it, after months of achieving nothing?
But T&T hasn't achieved nothing, its achieved a lot.
Its not been a silver bullet. That's not the same thing at all.
Not £38bn worth of benefits, the much cheaper ONS weekly study achieves the same thing at the fraction of the cost. Without a proper monitored isolation programme the testing system was always going to have marginal value in bringing the R value down. It's just an extremely expensive near real time version of the ONS study.
That's not the fault of Test & Trace, there was no political will at all for a draconian isolation programme. i.e. Force people to isolate under threat of a severe penalty.
There was no (or wildly insufficient) support available even to those willing to isolate voluntarily. An oversight that cost us £billions & seems incomprehensible from the outside.
I do wonder if Germany's relatively generous sick pay (alongside a lot of testing early on) was one of the factors in keeping things relatively under control in the first wave.
Not £38bn worth of benefits, the much cheaper ONS weekly study achieves the same thing at the fraction of the cost. Without a proper monitored isolation programme the testing system was always going to have marginal value in bringing the R value down. It's just an extremely expensive near real time version of the ONS study.
That's not the fault of Test & Trace, there was no political will at all for a draconian isolation programme. i.e. Force people to isolate under threat of a severe penalty.
It doesn't have to be a choice between draconian and nothing - this is the sort of thing the Nudge Unit used to be about.
Just having people check and measure whether people were complying would have made some difference, and at least we'd know what the challenge was.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
European vaccine roll out - slow supply is only part of the story - country roll outs have been slow too (along with focussing on delivering second doses):
Some (eg Malta) have over-delivered EU supply by buying privately.
Very interesting article in the current Pharmaceutical Journal on the process Coventry Hospital went through to get ready to give the first vaccination, to Mrs Keenan.
There's something in there about national "store second dose" policies.
But also that EU-central have been trying to shift blame onto "inefficient national logistics" for some time. Various Brussels Journos have been pushing that in their role as Unofficial EU Press Officers.
In essence it was missing the logistical setup Matt Hancock told them here to get in place last year, so that it would be "ready when it arrived". For those that did not do it, it therefore fell back onto fitness for purpose (or not) of pre-existing infrastructure.
I saw an interesting article comparing eg which countries had fully developed population health databases.
Yes
Many countries paid some money to buy vaccines - and assumed that they were just another medicine to be fed into their national healthcare systems.
If you want to vaccination 0.5%+ (or even 1%) of your population per day, then you need a different kind of effort. Not just buying the vaccines like aspirin. Not just investing in production. But setting up a national level infrastructure to take the vaccines, distribute them, find the people to vaccinate, vaccinate them once, and then find them again to do the second dose.
Not £38bn worth of benefits, the much cheaper ONS weekly study achieves the same thing at the fraction of the cost. Without a proper monitored isolation programme the testing system was always going to have marginal value in bringing the R value down. It's just an extremely expensive near real time version of the ONS study.
That's not the fault of Test & Trace, there was no political will at all for a draconian isolation programme. i.e. Force people to isolate under threat of a severe penalty.
It doesn't have to be a choice between draconian and nothing - this is the sort of thing the Nudge Unit used to be about.
Just having people check and measure whether people were complying would have made some difference, and at least we'd know what the challenge was.
That is happening.
My wife got a phone call (what seemed like) every single day while she was isolating.
In truth, I don't think we know how the land lies currently in terms of electoral calculations. Normal politics is simply in abeyance - probably to incumbent advantage - and until that changes it will be difficult to form a clear objective view as to where we might be heading.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Not £38bn worth of benefits, the much cheaper ONS weekly study achieves the same thing at the fraction of the cost. Without a proper monitored isolation programme the testing system was always going to have marginal value in bringing the R value down. It's just an extremely expensive near real time version of the ONS study.
That's not the fault of Test & Trace, there was no political will at all for a draconian isolation programme. i.e. Force people to isolate under threat of a severe penalty.
There was no (or wildly insufficient) support available even to those willing to isolate voluntarily. An oversight that cost us £billions & seems incomprehensible from the outside.
Paying people is necessary, but not sufficient. We really needed daily checks on all premises where people were isolating, and people breaking the rules needed to go to prison.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Of course the people running the existing infrastructure were not exactly quiet with time to concentrate on building a new system either. They were working flat out on their existing jobs.
and yet slews of the self righteous demanded we put it in place and attacked Bozo for not doing it fast enough
they'll all just disappear in to the woodwork like the "experts" who demanded we have 100,000s of respirators
It`s populism again isn`t it. No matter that it was never going to work, was always a waste of money and plunged the country into even more debt - it was popular so let`s do it anyway. It`s about the government following the line of least resistance rather than governing in a proper manner. They are the ultimate weather cocks.
Labour ought to be spending a great deal of their time looking into where the £38bn went.
If the vaccination project has the desired effect then almost everybody will be spending the Summer partying, on holidays and generally breathing a massive, extended sigh of relief. Spending on test and trace, along with everything else to do with the Plague, will disappear into the black hole of a public inquiry which will take years to deliberate and report, and which the great mass of the public will invest no time or interest in at all.
The pandemic is going to join Brexit as a settled topic which most voters want to put behind them. If Labour is to have a future then it has to look to the future, not the past.
To get back into the game Labour needs three things: for the Conservatives to stuff up the economic recovery, to detoxify itself with small-c conservative voters, and a clear alternative vision of what it would do differently. It can't do anything about point 1, and points 2 and 3 are both big challenges that require careful thought. Devoting undue time to criticisms that the Government can easily swat away would be pointless.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that as a result of T&T?
Edit: the only serious defence of T&T for me, is that it's effectively just a way of massaging the unemployment figures downwards. And that most of the cost would have otherwise gone on benefit payments of one kind or another anyway.
There's "lockdown" and there's "restrictions". On most matrices, all being well, "lockdown" will end on 12 April. All remaining well "restrictions" will end on 21 June. Optimistically all adults will have been offerd a vaccine by the end of May. which is several weeks after 12 April.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
I think that you also have to be realistic about the situation the government faced. The pressure to do something, anything, everything, was immense and rightly so. Some of the things that were done, such as the mad panic for PPE which proved to be largely unjustified and unneeded proved to be a waste of money. Others, such as the early investment in and the purchase of vaccine, were touched by genius. A lot was in between.
So what? I mean, the pandemic has cost over £1trn. Anything, everything that might help should be done by a government in such a scenario.
Exactly!
Billions on PPE, billions on test and trace, billions on vaccines . . . its all inconsequential next to the cost of the pandemic. The government has thrown everything at the wall, money is no object, and this is the result:
How much will this save the country? A billion? £37 billion? Or hundreds of billions?
Worth mentioning that ComRes had the worst result by far in 2019.
ComRes and ICM were in approximately the same place, but the point is taken nonetheless. If one had to pick between the recent ComRes and YouGov figures as an indicator of where opinion lies at the moment, the YouGov would seem the more plausible.
On topic: the betting markets must be factoring in the possibility of high structural unemployment and all the nasty decisions the Government has to make about tax and spending when this is all over. There's a very long way to go until the next election, but demographic change, the Scottish situation and Labour's shrunken voter coalition all favour the Tories. Another Conservative victory has to be the odds-on favourite in all of this, and where Labour is meant to conjure an overall majority from Lord alone knows.
All that - plus the boundary changes favouring the CP.
I`ve been laying LP majority for a while now. I can`t believe you can still lay it at 4.8. I would want over 10/1 if I was backing Lab.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that as a result of T&T?
Edit: the only serious defence of T&T for me, is that it's effectively just a way of massaging the unemployment figures downwards. And that most of the cost would have otherwise gone on benefit payments of one kind or another anyway.
There's "lockdown" and there's "restrictions". On most matrices, all being well, "lockdown" will end on 12 April. All remaining well "restrictions" will end on 21 June. Optimistically all adults will have been offerd a vaccine by the end of May. which is several weeks after 12 April.
I would say lockdown is over once indoor hospitality reopens, which is currently only late May, it should be April IMHO.
I would draw a distinction with other restrictions and nightclubs which is June.
Not £38bn worth of benefits, the much cheaper ONS weekly study achieves the same thing at the fraction of the cost. Without a proper monitored isolation programme the testing system was always going to have marginal value in bringing the R value down. It's just an extremely expensive near real time version of the ONS study.
That's not the fault of Test & Trace, there was no political will at all for a draconian isolation programme. i.e. Force people to isolate under threat of a severe penalty.
It doesn't have to be a choice between draconian and nothing - this is the sort of thing the Nudge Unit used to be about.
Just having people check and measure whether people were complying would have made some difference, and at least we'd know what the challenge was.
That is happening.
My wife got a phone call (what seemed like) every single day while she was isolating.
That's a welcome change, but do they release any statistics on compliance?
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
But T&T hasn't done anything of the sort, it's lengthened the pandemic by months because it doesn't have any kind of serious isolation system and we've pissed £38bn away on it.
No its not done anything of the sort.
You're contrasting test and trace with some fictionalised "serious isolation system" that you have been an advocate of from the beginning but that fictionalised system didn't exist here or anywhere else in the West. That's got nothing to do with test and trace whatsoever, that's to do with the country not having the willpower to take isolation as seriously as you wanted.
If the pandemic is lengthened then please name a European or properly equivalent to the UK country that ended the pandemic months before us?
Have we ended it? It doesn't feel like it. The French and Dutch have considerably more freedom than we do right now.......
Going back to the thread header this spat is a good reason why betting against Johnson seems a reasonable bet at the moment. After the relief will come the anger and this could be a tidal wave.
If a government that presided over 150,000 deaths and a Brexit that by conservative estimates will cost 4% in growth and 100, 000 jobs gets away with it then we are indeed a country of Hartlepudlians.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that as a result of T&T?
Edit: the only serious defence of T&T for me, is that it's effectively just a way of massaging the unemployment figures downwards. And that most of the cost would have otherwise gone on benefit payments of one kind or another anyway.
There's "lockdown" and there's "restrictions". On most matrices, all being well, "lockdown" will end on 12 April. All remaining well "restrictions" will end on 21 June. Optimistically all adults will have been offerd a vaccine by the end of May. which is several weeks after 12 April.
Either way, all those developments are being driven by the vaccine programme, and not at all because T&T is suddenly helping.
I am perfectly willing to accept there are some benefits to having advance warning as to when and where hospital admissions are going to start rising, or picking up new variants of the virus, but I can see zero evidence that T&T is contributing to the restrictions being lifted a single day ahead of when they otherwise would be.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Exactly, and the targets seemed implausibly ambitious. We now do 800,000 or more PCR tests every single day, and the critics no longer talk about test numbers or turn-around times. The UK's testing capacity is gargantuan now.
A ONS style survey is fine for the population as a whole, if you simply want to know how much disease is out there, but if you to want to identify cases you need to test individuals, and we can now apply that testing to essentially everybody who wants a test.
and yet slews of the self righteous demanded we put it in place and attacked Bozo for not doing it fast enough
they'll all just disappear in to the woodwork like the "experts" who demanded we have 100,000s of respirators
It`s populism again isn`t it. No matter that it was never going to work, was always a waste of money and plunged the country into even more debt - it was popular so let`s do it anyway. It`s about the government following the line of least resistance rather than governing in a proper manner. They are the ultimate weather cocks.
But it did work, it just wasn't a magic solution that could magic the entire pandemic away.
To put it into context the last report into this by SAGE estimated that T&T was reducing R by the same amount school closures were. So in a parallel universe where T&T didn't exist we'd now have the same number of cases as we would have had if the schools had been open for the last couple of months.
And to get the same R reduction now if T&T didn't exist we'd still need schools closed.
There's a big gap between doing nothing and doing everything. The reality is that most things we do are "doing something" which is a much less interesting story.
School closures didn't end the pandemic, but they helped. T&T didn't end the pandemic, but it helped.
and yet slews of the self righteous demanded we put it in place and attacked Bozo for not doing it fast enough
they'll all just disappear in to the woodwork like the "experts" who demanded we have 100,000s of respirators
It`s populism again isn`t it. No matter that it was never going to work, was always a waste of money and plunged the country into even more debt - it was popular so let`s do it anyway. It`s about the government following the line of least resistance rather than governing in a proper manner. They are the ultimate weather cocks.
But it did work, it just wasn't a magic solution that could magic the entire pandemic away.
To put it into context the last report into this by SAGE estimated that T&T was reducing R by the same amount school closures were. So in a parallel universe where T&T didn't exist we'd now have the same number of cases as we would have had if the schools had been open for the last couple of months.
And to get the same R reduction now if T&T didn't exist we'd still need schools closed.
There's a big gap between doing nothing and doing everything.
School closures didn't end the pandemic, but they helped. T&T didn't end the pandemic, but it helped.
I'd rather have T&T than school closures.
Did the extent to which T&T worked justify the expenditure on it? - that`s the question.
For the sake of transparency the tweeter appears to be an anti masker, Soros conspiracy theorising, Fauci hating, China virus kinda guy, so an element of Alien v. Predator going on.
Shame about Piers Morgan. I thought and think he's great.
I know he doesn't satisfy either the TOWIE- watching, or the PB if only every journalist was as good as I would be contingent but I thought he was excellent at his job.
Apart from his strange and evil fixation on dissing Meghan he wasn't bad.
It seems he once went out with her and then she ignored him ever after, which might be the reason he then acted as conductor-in-chief for the UK press vendetta against her. I think he admitted himself that he was angry.
I know it’s only Piers Morgan. But from reports it does seem to be true that this happens to most everyone she knows. Makes you feel the most special person in the world and then throws you aside when the next rung of the ladder appears. Wendell Pierce (aka Suits Rachel’s Dad) was pretty scathing yesterday and has been in the past too.
It’s a strategy that’s certainly worked from a social climbing perspective so far but where does it ultimately lead once you’ve done it to the Queen of England?
I think she's someone both sensitive enough to fall victim to other people, and ruthless enough to toss other people aside. Similary, she was genuinely idealistic enough to think she was making a positive difference to other people by joining the monarchy, and incurious and self-orientated enough not really to listen too long for the institution's own side of the story on how that might work. A complicated person.
Both articles are worth the read. The Royal Family has years of form at turning spouses into the villain of the soap opera.
Camilla is the interesting exception, who was considered unsuitable in Charles bachelor days, leading to the three in a marriage problem. She doesn't get great press, but not the vilification that the others got. Being a horsey posh helps, I suppose.
Simply not true that everyone got vilified and that Palace learnt no lessons from Diana disaster. All the women who married minor royal princes (which is what Harry is) did not get routinely vilified by the Palace - though pretty much all, certainly in recent times, faced press attacks. See, for instance, Kate and Sophie Wessex. There were two things which the Palace learnt from Diana - let people marry for love not convenience and second allow them time to really learn about each other. That has worked very successfully indeed with William and Kate and Edward and Sophie. It might possibly be relevant that both of them came from solid loving homes, a point which has been ignored in the H&M saga but might be rather more important than people are willing to concede.
Camilla got awful press for a very long while.
The fundamental issue it seems to me - from the outside anyway - is that H&M thought they should be more important than they are, should change the monarchy etc and did not realise or want to realise that they are fundamentally rather unimportant when the heir to the heir has three children already. It would be like the Duke of Kent informing George VI that he ought to have a say in what the monarchy should be like because he had married a glamorous and very beautiful exotic Greek wife. Any changes to the monarchy would be decided by HMQ, Charles and William and Kate, not others whose job would be to go along with it. Either put up or get out. They've got out and lashing out about what happened seems sad, more than anything else. A slimmed down monarchy is best for all concerned but does mean that the supporting parts don't get to star on stage. H&M didn't want to be supporting parts to the rather duller William and Kate.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that as a result of T&T?
Edit: the only serious defence of T&T for me, is that it's effectively just a way of massaging the unemployment figures downwards. And that most of the cost would have otherwise gone on benefit payments of one kind or another anyway.
There's "lockdown" and there's "restrictions". On most matrices, all being well, "lockdown" will end on 12 April. All remaining well "restrictions" will end on 21 June. Optimistically all adults will have been offerd a vaccine by the end of May. which is several weeks after 12 April.
Either way, all those developments are being driven by the vaccine programme, and not at all because T&T is suddenly helping.
I am perfectly willing to accept there are some benefits to having advance warning as to when and where hospital admissions are going to start rising, or picking up new variants of the virus, but I can see zero evidence that T&T is contributing to the restrictions being lifted a single day ahead of when they otherwise would be.
T&T isn't "suddenly helping" it has always been helping. The vaccine programme is building upon T&T not instead of it.
Vaccinations are reducing R by about 0.03 per week. T&T (from memory) is reducing R by 0.3
So T&T is doing the same as 10 weeks of vaccinations in reducing R. But the 10 weeks of vaccinations are building upon T&T not instead of it.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that as a result of T&T?
Edit: the only serious defence of T&T for me, is that it's effectively just a way of massaging the unemployment figures downwards. And that most of the cost would have otherwise gone on benefit payments of one kind or another anyway.
There's "lockdown" and there's "restrictions". On most matrices, all being well, "lockdown" will end on 12 April. All remaining well "restrictions" will end on 21 June. Optimistically all adults will have been offerd a vaccine by the end of May. which is several weeks after 12 April.
Yes. And there's a sense where I think you can say lockdown is over now. I get the strong impression that most people are taking their own decisions on household mixing and meeting up with friends and family. They are not combing through the rules and guidelines to see precisely how many people they can meet up with, and precisely where. There will be some who wait for the government to grant express permission to go and sit with a pal on a parkbench but I think that's a small minority. Could be wrong but that's my sense of it.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Also worth noting that it failed utterly to trace the most important case, the missing Brazilian.
Mr Justice Swift ordered that the guidance should be rewritten to remove the words “such as” and “or passport”, to make clear that respondents should only use the sex recorded on their birth or gender recognition certificate. A little more than an hour after the judge’s ruling the text had been changed.
The campaign group Fair Play For Women, which crowdfunded £100,000 to bring the legal challenge, had argued that the ONS wording allowed “self-identification through the back door”.
This is interesting. You'd have thought the ONS would have wanted the sex question to be as unambiguous as possible, but I suspect they were worried about a challenge from other groups.
Of course, whether or not people fill it in honestly is another matter.
That rather begs the question. I suspect trans people feel "honestly" that their sex is what their gender is. Presumably anyone who has paid a small fortune for (literally life-changing) sex reassignment surgery or whatever it is called this week feels this very strongly indeed.
Whether it makes any practical difference is another question. This strikes me as one of those "point of principle" cases designed to enrich the legal profession. I suppose the government will now be able to count the number of people whose gender is different from their birth sex and... do what exactly? Erect more lampposts? Open more libraries? Fwiw when I completed the census before this judgment, the import of this guidance passed me by.
I think one underlying shift here is that the great assertion that "sexual orientation is basic and unchangeable" - once gay, always gay etc - which I think has been a key campaigning point since the start of such campaigns has now changed to orientation being changeable almost at will.
eg Watching an interview the other day the interviewee said 'sometimes I call myself lesbian, sometimes bi."
There have always been people around who have changed their sexual orientation several times in a life, though very few that I have seen explicitly talking about it.
Then to demand that gender is a fundamental identity about which everybody else and the physical environment must realign becomes very hard to justify imo.
Correct me if you think I am wrong here. I think I have detected a change in argumentation over perhaps 15 years, certainly since say the late 1990s.
I think you're wrong. The B in LGBT existed even in the late 1990s. The point and its not original is that there is a spectrum.
Some people are heterosexual, attracted to the opposite sex and only the opposite sex. They can't help who they're attracted to, but neither are they expected to do so either.
Some people are homosexual, attracted to the same sex and only the same sex. They can't help who they're attracted to, but were in the past.
Some people are bisexual, attracted to both men and women. They can't help this either, but in the past may have been able to find someone of the opposite sex they were attracted to but nowadays may not find that's the one they fall in love with, since they're no longer restricted by societies expectations.
Though the idea that gender and sexual orientation are completely unchangeable, rather than able to change with other aspects of personality development is a fairly new one.
It doesn't mean dismissing sexuality as a teenage phase, or even a right of passage. The idea of a spectrum of orientation is not quite the same as shifting along that spectrum, at different times of life.
Let me add a question to both.
So if sexual orientation is innate / unchangeable, why do people change their sexual orientation - either as I pointed out ('sometimes I say this, sometimes that'), or 2 or 3 times in a lifetime?
I think there's also an aspect of different use of language between say Gen X/Y and Millenials. And also an element of fashion. How big that is, I am not in a position to judge easily.
If someone changes their sexual orientation, such as a friend of mine, formerly happily heterosexually married with children, coming out as gay, it is generally taken that he was always gay, just repressed and living a lie.
On the other hand, I know straight people who had homosexual experiences as youths , but became firmly heterosexual later. Were they also living a lie, or are they doing so now? No one can know, other than the individual.
I do think that identity is a flexible thing, and how we see ourselves, and how we interact with the world changes over time. I don't see why sexuality should be more rigid than any other durable aspect of self.
I do agree, which is why it can be weird to treat any awakening as it were as always being like that no longer living a lie interpretation that you raise. Certainly for some that will be so, but sometimes its treated like that's always so.
Besides anything else, if that thread from the Times journalist that was posted earlier today is correct, Raab couldn't show anyone export figures for AZ because export is unrestricted and consequently no such data are collected. And Mr Weber's statement also attracts the by now standard put down: why would the EU be bothered about UK vaccine exports, because we currently only make one kind of vaccine here and you're no good at using it.
Oh, and he also makes the standard EU = Europe mistake, tsk tsk.
Shame about Piers Morgan. I thought and think he's great.
I know he doesn't satisfy either the TOWIE- watching, or the PB if only every journalist was as good as I would be contingent but I thought he was excellent at his job.
Excellent as a provocateur, rather than a journalist, I would say. Perpetual anger and narcissism, with the occasional entertaining flourish, which is partly why he got on so well with Trump for such a long time, I think.
Incredibly fortunate to have had the past decade he has had still in the public eye.
Phonehacking.
Phone hacking. Fake photos against soldiers. Now ridiculing mental health.
Hope he doesn't end up on GB News.
Surely he'd be right up their street. The purpose of GB News is to make the flame of Outrage burn brighter for the people who think that the country would be better if uppity women knew their place, there were less foreigners, other countries recognised our greatness, we stopped pandering to deviants like puffs and socialists and wokers and environmentalists and feminists and ...
But do all of Sean's personalities really make up a steady and reliable viewership for ratings?
Only if the breakfast show goes out in the afternoon!
Personally I cannot see a mass market for GB news. There isn't much market already for serious news, politics and current affairs on TV. It looks to me a niche vanity project by people who think their opinions matter.
Twitter is a vanity project for people who think their opinions matter!
@Gallowgate May not be any use but who knows Glasgow Bar Assoc @GlasgowBarAssoc · 15h Anyone looking for a job? #lawjobs
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and yet slews of the self righteous demanded we put it in place and attacked Bozo for not doing it fast enough
they'll all just disappear in to the woodwork like the "experts" who demanded we have 100,000s of respirators
It`s populism again isn`t it. No matter that it was never going to work, was always a waste of money and plunged the country into even more debt - it was popular so let`s do it anyway. It`s about the government following the line of least resistance rather than governing in a proper manner. They are the ultimate weather cocks.
But it did work, it just wasn't a magic solution that could magic the entire pandemic away.
To put it into context the last report into this by SAGE estimated that T&T was reducing R by the same amount school closures were. So in a parallel universe where T&T didn't exist we'd now have the same number of cases as we would have had if the schools had been open for the last couple of months.
And to get the same R reduction now if T&T didn't exist we'd still need schools closed.
There's a big gap between doing nothing and doing everything.
School closures didn't end the pandemic, but they helped. T&T didn't end the pandemic, but it helped.
I'd rather have T&T than school closures.
Did the extent to which T&T worked justify the expenditure on it? - that`s the question.
When the pandemic has cost us a trillion and if it helps end the pandemic weeks or months before it would be over had it not existed?
Labour ought to be spending a great deal of their time looking into where the £38bn went.
If the vaccination project has the desired effect then almost everybody will be spending the Summer partying, on holidays and generally breathing a massive, extended sigh of relief. Spending on test and trace, along with everything else to do with the Plague, will disappear into the black hole of a public inquiry which will take years to deliberate and report, and which the great mass of the public will invest no time or interest in at all.
The pandemic is going to join Brexit as a settled topic which most voters want to put behind them. If Labour is to have a future then it has to look to the future, not the past.
To get back into the game Labour needs three things: for the Conservatives to stuff up the economic recovery, to detoxify itself with small-c conservative voters, and a clear alternative vision of what it would do differently. It can't do anything about point 1, and points 2 and 3 are both big challenges that require careful thought. Devoting undue time to criticisms that the Government can easily swat away would be pointless.
I don't disagree - but it is worth recalling that as recently as late April 2000 we were regularly seeing Tory leads in the 20% - 26% range. That did not last , and it has to be doubtful whether the vaccine boost will be less transient.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
Chris Whitty went into quite some detail yesterday on the benefits.
But then that got drowned out because the media have no interest in that and instead people harped on about him saying there will be future surges after unlocking or in the winter, while cutting out the part where he said but people won't die as much due to the vaccines and we'll need to live with it.
Not £38bn worth of benefits, the much cheaper ONS weekly study achieves the same thing at the fraction of the cost. Without a proper monitored isolation programme the testing system was always going to have marginal value in bringing the R value down. It's just an extremely expensive near real time version of the ONS study.
Perhaps not 38 billion pounds worth but no one really knows yet, certainly not from this committee if their public mutterings are anything to go by. The cost benefit of the program is not trivial and will be controversial when properly done with many value judgements intertwined within.
But avoiding lockdown will be considered to be a very narrow metric of success.
And yet the country in Europe with the most testing and the most vaccines has by very far the fewest Covid cases. Despite most of the public still being unvaccinated of course.
The pandemic is costing us a trillion. It is World War levels of expenditure. In a World War you don't penny pinch on munitions.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
I think that you also have to be realistic about the situation the government faced. The pressure to do something, anything, everything, was immense and rightly so. Some of the things that were done, such as the mad panic for PPE which proved to be largely unjustified and unneeded proved to be a waste of money. Others, such as the early investment in and the purchase of vaccine, were touched by genius. A lot was in between.
So what? I mean, the pandemic has cost over £1trn. Anything, everything that might help should be done by a government in such a scenario.
Exactly!
Billions on PPE, billions on test and trace, billions on vaccines . . . its all inconsequential next to the cost of the pandemic. The government has thrown everything at the wall, money is no object, and this is the result:
How much will this save the country? A billion? £37 billion? Or hundreds of billions?
And when you look at the test positivity rate - it strongly suggests that many of our European neighbours have no idea how big a problem they've got:
The WHO metric for a pandemic "under control" is a positivity rate below 5%.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that as a result of T&T?
Edit: the only serious defence of T&T for me, is that it's effectively just a way of massaging the unemployment figures downwards. And that most of the cost would have otherwise gone on benefit payments of one kind or another anyway.
There's "lockdown" and there's "restrictions". On most matrices, all being well, "lockdown" will end on 12 April. All remaining well "restrictions" will end on 21 June. Optimistically all adults will have been offerd a vaccine by the end of May. which is several weeks after 12 April.
Either way, all those developments are being driven by the vaccine programme, and not at all because T&T is suddenly helping.
I am perfectly willing to accept there are some benefits to having advance warning as to when and where hospital admissions are going to start rising, or picking up new variants of the virus, but I can see zero evidence that T&T is contributing to the restrictions being lifted a single day ahead of when they otherwise would be.
T&T isn't "suddenly helping" it has always been helping. The vaccine programme is building upon T&T not instead of it.
Vaccinations are reducing R by about 0.03 per week. T&T (from memory) is reducing R by 0.3
So T&T is doing the same as 10 weeks of vaccinations in reducing R. But the 10 weeks of vaccinations are building upon T&T not instead of it.
Yeah, well, you're going to need to provide a source for that 0.3 number before we can make any more progress. I just don't believe it's had any significant impact on R, for the reasons that a) the delay between exposure and testing positive is too great, b) there's no way of checking compliance with isolation orders, and c) R is almost impossible to estimate with any reasonable degree of certainty at the best of times.
Shame about Piers Morgan. I thought and think he's great.
I know he doesn't satisfy either the TOWIE- watching, or the PB if only every journalist was as good as I would be contingent but I thought he was excellent at his job.
Excellent as a provocateur, rather than a journalist, I would say. Perpetual anger and narcissism, with the occasional entertaining flourish, which is partly why he got on so well with Trump for such a long time, I think.
Incredibly fortunate to have had the past decade he has had still in the public eye.
Phonehacking.
Phone hacking. Fake photos against soldiers. Now ridiculing mental health.
Hope he doesn't end up on GB News.
Surely he'd be right up their street. The purpose of GB News is to make the flame of Outrage burn brighter for the people who think that the country would be better if uppity women knew their place, there were less foreigners, other countries recognised our greatness, we stopped pandering to deviants like puffs and socialists and wokers and environmentalists and feminists and ...
But do all of Sean's personalities really make up a steady and reliable viewership for ratings?
Only if the breakfast show goes out in the afternoon!
Personally I cannot see a mass market for GB news. There isn't much market already for serious news, politics and current affairs on TV. It looks to me a niche vanity project by people who think their opinions matter.
Twitter is a vanity project for people who think their opinions matter!
@Gallowgate May not be any use but who knows Glasgow Bar Assoc @GlasgowBarAssoc · 15h Anyone looking for a job? #lawjobs
Harvie Diamond is looking for a second year trainee or newly qualified solicitor for the position of criminal court assistant in his Glasgow office located beside the court. C.V. by email to harviesdiamond@gmail.com
Feel free to share!
Thanks for the heads-up, I appreciate it, but unfortunately I don't qualify and it's a different legal system in any case!
Not £38bn worth of benefits, the much cheaper ONS weekly study achieves the same thing at the fraction of the cost. Without a proper monitored isolation programme the testing system was always going to have marginal value in bringing the R value down. It's just an extremely expensive near real time version of the ONS study.
That's not the fault of Test & Trace, there was no political will at all for a draconian isolation programme. i.e. Force people to isolate under threat of a severe penalty.
There was no (or wildly insufficient) support available even to those willing to isolate voluntarily. An oversight that cost us £billions & seems incomprehensible from the outside.
I do wonder if Germany's relatively generous sick pay (alongside a lot of testing early on) was one of the factors in keeping things relatively under control in the first wave.
It was also their ability to trace far more effectively than us. Which was itself a function of their highly devolved health infrastructure. Which is wonderful for tracing contacts. Absolutely disastrous for mass vaccination of an entire population. Local councils' already existent public and environmental health officials were sidelined here, instead of scaled up to deal with the trace and isolate bit. Quite why this was is the burning question.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
I think that you also have to be realistic about the situation the government faced. The pressure to do something, anything, everything, was immense and rightly so. Some of the things that were done, such as the mad panic for PPE which proved to be largely unjustified and unneeded proved to be a waste of money. Others, such as the early investment in and the purchase of vaccine, were touched by genius. A lot was in between.
So what? I mean, the pandemic has cost over £1trn. Anything, everything that might help should be done by a government in such a scenario.
Exactly!
Billions on PPE, billions on test and trace, billions on vaccines . . . its all inconsequential next to the cost of the pandemic. The government has thrown everything at the wall, money is no object, and this is the result:
How much will this save the country? A billion? £37 billion? Or hundreds of billions?
And when you look at the test positivity rate - it strongly suggests that many of our European neighbours have no idea how big a problem they've got:
The one thing that strikes me every time I look at EU figures is the way the hospital and death point to the actual infection rates being far higher than the claimed numbers.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
Go back to mid 2020 and try and make the argument that "there's no real point to mass testing". Nobody would even dare to have made that argument.
We decided as a country, with across the board support, that everybody who wants a test should get one, that the tests should be the best possible, and that the person tested should get their results as soon as possible. We built a system to do that, at enormous expense.
Now if there had only been the same collective will to make people isolate we might have made better use of the testing, but there was essentially no support for forcing people to isolate. We decided to trust people to follow the rules, and surveys say that most of them did not follow the rules. That's the failing, not enough carrot and stick, the testing system itself is doing what we asked of it.
One is "My Truth", as use by Oprah. To me that means "My Opinion".
Another was on R4 earlier - the idea that a personal account of a personal experience is beyond question, and must be accepted as revealed truth. To me - that's just a no; of course it must be tested, especially when not self-consistent.
I'll have a bash. I like these sort of convoluted linguistic issues.
It means my take rather than my opinion. The substitution of "truth" for "take" is a suitable innovation for where it's a person talking about how something has affected them, how it's come across, made them feel, this sort of thing. Because here it requires and deserves added weight over and above "take". And certainly "opinion" is not right.
To illustrate: Woman describes how she feels belittled herself when male colleagues talk about female celebs in an objectified and contemptuous manner.
That is not "her opinion", it is "her take". But "her take" is not quite strong enough. It makes it sound as if her offering on the matter is just one of many to be considered equally. We need something to elevate it. Her Truth. It works.
Question begged. What about the men in my example? One of them now gives his side, says it's not that often, and we talk about lots of other things, she's being a snowflake etc. So is that His Truth?
Answer: No. It isn't. That (rightly) stays at the level of "his take". Why? Because His (or Her) Truth is restricted to those who are punching up. Or not punching, just explaining in this case, but you know what I mean.
So, with the Meghan interview, I'd say there was a hotchpotch of her opinions, her takes, and her truths.
That's my take on My Truth.
That seems unnecessarily convoluted. I cant really see how comprehension or empathy is advanced by such linguistic contortions.
Especially when the opinion of people commenting on such issues is intentionally steered by participants of whatever stripe to black and white perceptions of fact.
'Truth is restricted to those who are punching up' seems like another example of something that needs to be explained that it does not mean what it looks like it means, and that never helps. And who decides what is up or down?
Some things are complicated. We don't need to make them more complicated than needed.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that as a result of T&T?
Edit: the only serious defence of T&T for me, is that it's effectively just a way of massaging the unemployment figures downwards. And that most of the cost would have otherwise gone on benefit payments of one kind or another anyway.
There's "lockdown" and there's "restrictions". On most matrices, all being well, "lockdown" will end on 12 April. All remaining well "restrictions" will end on 21 June. Optimistically all adults will have been offerd a vaccine by the end of May. which is several weeks after 12 April.
Either way, all those developments are being driven by the vaccine programme, and not at all because T&T is suddenly helping.
I am perfectly willing to accept there are some benefits to having advance warning as to when and where hospital admissions are going to start rising, or picking up new variants of the virus, but I can see zero evidence that T&T is contributing to the restrictions being lifted a single day ahead of when they otherwise would be.
T&T isn't "suddenly helping" it has always been helping. The vaccine programme is building upon T&T not instead of it.
Vaccinations are reducing R by about 0.03 per week. T&T (from memory) is reducing R by 0.3
So T&T is doing the same as 10 weeks of vaccinations in reducing R. But the 10 weeks of vaccinations are building upon T&T not instead of it.
Can you please cite a source for that 0.3 reduction on R. I've seen papers which say it's negligible so would be interested to see who is saying it has such a large effect.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
I think that you also have to be realistic about the situation the government faced. The pressure to do something, anything, everything, was immense and rightly so. Some of the things that were done, such as the mad panic for PPE which proved to be largely unjustified and unneeded proved to be a waste of money. Others, such as the early investment in and the purchase of vaccine, were touched by genius. A lot was in between.
So what? I mean, the pandemic has cost over £1trn. Anything, everything that might help should be done by a government in such a scenario.
Exactly!
Billions on PPE, billions on test and trace, billions on vaccines . . . its all inconsequential next to the cost of the pandemic. The government has thrown everything at the wall, money is no object, and this is the result:
How much will this save the country? A billion? £37 billion? Or hundreds of billions?
And when you look at the test positivity rate - it strongly suggests that many of our European neighbours have no idea how big a problem they've got:
The one thing that strikes me every time I look at EU figures is the way the hospital and death point to the actual infection rates being far higher than the claimed numbers.
And the excess mortality of some countries point to the pandemic being significantly more deadly than any officially claimed numbers.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
And yet the country in Europe with the most testing and the most vaccines has by very far the fewest Covid cases. Despite most of the public still being unvaccinated of course.
The pandemic is costing us a trillion. It is World War levels of expenditure. In a World War you don't penny pinch on munitions.
The reason we have fewest cases in Europe is because 1 - huge vaccine programme, 2 - lockdown and 3 - very high levels of natural immunity due to Kent COVID.
The testing programme isn't relevant in any of these. You're adding up 2+2 and saying the answer is a banana.
£38 billion wasted? Hmm. If the sole metric of success is 'preventing another lockdown' then, yes. But I think testing millions of people a week must be providing at least some other benefit beyond that quite narrow view.
What benefits?
We had: Probably the world's most comprehensive testing system resulting in us having more accurate information about the spread of the virus than anyone else. A database which allowed us to do the genomic sequencing and the ability to check the spread of variants in all but real time. A large number of people traced and self isolating inhibiting the further spread of the virus. We now have the capacity to do mass testing facilitating the reopening of schools as a first step.
Could some things have been done better? Undoubtedly. Was it good value for money? Very hard to say. But if it is facilitating us coming out of lockdown a few weeks earlier (given the quality of information we have) then yes, it probably was.
Well said.
Its like the penny pinching about vaccines that Europe did. Could things have been done better here? Yes, of course. But compared to the cost of the pandemic, if T&T and the vaccine ends the pandemic a quarter earlier than would have otherwise been done then they'll more than repay their cost.
This cannot possibly be true. We're in lockdown and will remain so until the vaccination program is nearing completion. How on earth do you calculate a three month reduction in end date from that as a result of T&T?
Edit: the only serious defence of T&T for me, is that it's effectively just a way of massaging the unemployment figures downwards. And that most of the cost would have otherwise gone on benefit payments of one kind or another anyway.
There's "lockdown" and there's "restrictions". On most matrices, all being well, "lockdown" will end on 12 April. All remaining well "restrictions" will end on 21 June. Optimistically all adults will have been offerd a vaccine by the end of May. which is several weeks after 12 April.
Either way, all those developments are being driven by the vaccine programme, and not at all because T&T is suddenly helping.
I am perfectly willing to accept there are some benefits to having advance warning as to when and where hospital admissions are going to start rising, or picking up new variants of the virus, but I can see zero evidence that T&T is contributing to the restrictions being lifted a single day ahead of when they otherwise would be.
T&T isn't "suddenly helping" it has always been helping. The vaccine programme is building upon T&T not instead of it.
Vaccinations are reducing R by about 0.03 per week. T&T (from memory) is reducing R by 0.3
So T&T is doing the same as 10 weeks of vaccinations in reducing R. But the 10 weeks of vaccinations are building upon T&T not instead of it.
Yeah, well, you're going to need to provide a source for that 0.3 number before we can make any more progress. I just don't believe it's had any significant impact on R, for the reasons that a) the delay between exposure and testing positive is too great, b) there's no way of checking compliance with isolation orders, and c) R is almost impossible to estimate with any reasonable degree of certainty at the best of times.
I don't have the figures to hand but 0.3 was the low end of the estimate, so I've gone for the low end.
(a) Is unavoidable but its about 24-48h for a test turnaround during which time people are supposed to self-isolate while awaiting the results. Your (a) is why test and trace can't be a silver bullet on its own, but it doesn't mean it has zero impact on transmission.
(b) True again, but again not being perfect doesn't mean zero impact on transmission. Do you really believe people are having zero isolation compared to what they would have after a positive test? Seriously?
(c) That's true, but again not being perfect doesn't mean we can't have an estimate.
The overwhelming majority of this country is still unvaccinated, and we vaccinated the vulnerable shielding people first, yet we have the lowest case rate in Europe. While doing the most tests in Europe. Why is that?
Do you seriously believe that testing has had ZERO impact on transmission and the entire reason are mostly unvaccinated public has very few cases is just due to vaccine impacts?
Seriously Max just think how red-faced your average Labour MP would get about such a suggestion, and to be fair I expect quite a lot of MPs from other parties would be similarly outraged. There was simply no will in the UK for the sort of interventions that would ensure people complied with isolation rules.
Shame about Piers Morgan. I thought and think he's great.
I know he doesn't satisfy either the TOWIE- watching, or the PB if only every journalist was as good as I would be contingent but I thought he was excellent at his job.
Excellent as a provocateur, rather than a journalist, I would say. Perpetual anger and narcissism, with the occasional entertaining flourish, which is partly why he got on so well with Trump for such a long time, I think.
Incredibly fortunate to have had the past decade he has had still in the public eye.
Phonehacking.
Phone hacking. Fake photos against soldiers. Now ridiculing mental health.
Hope he doesn't end up on GB News.
Surely he'd be right up their street. The purpose of GB News is to make the flame of Outrage burn brighter for the people who think that the country would be better if uppity women knew their place, there were less foreigners, other countries recognised our greatness, we stopped pandering to deviants like puffs and socialists and wokers and environmentalists and feminists and ...
But do all of Sean's personalities really make up a steady and reliable viewership for ratings?
Only if the breakfast show goes out in the afternoon!
Personally I cannot see a mass market for GB news. There isn't much market already for serious news, politics and current affairs on TV. It looks to me a niche vanity project by people who think their opinions matter.
Twitter is a vanity project for people who think their opinions matter!
Exactly, we don't need another one.
Though PB is perhaps calling the kettle black.
In a specific and limited way, as is the point of a forum.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
Testing isn't pointless, no, but the claimed benefits so far of our system is population monitoring and variant monitoring. Both of these can be done with an improved version of the ONS study. If the benefit is limited to those two areas (and I think that's probably about right) then we should build a testing system around that as it would be about 5% of the annual cost.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
Pay them 3-5x their salary or a lump sum.
£1k per week and GPS tracking bracelets. Boom.
And. The opportunity, if circumstances needed, to stay in one of the thousands and thousands of local, empty hotel rooms. I feel like it's months since I made this point. But it was made repeatedly at the time by numerous posters. It was never very obscure.
Seriously Max just think how red-faced your average Labour MP would get about such a suggestion, and to be fair I expect quite a lot of MPs from other parties would be similarly outraged. There was simply no will in the UK for the sort of interventions that would ensure people complied with isolation rules.
No will for giving people money which would help to bring about the end of lockdown but plenty of will for closing the country for months? Huh?
And yet the country in Europe with the most testing and the most vaccines has by very far the fewest Covid cases. Despite most of the public still being unvaccinated of course.
The pandemic is costing us a trillion. It is World War levels of expenditure. In a World War you don't penny pinch on munitions.
The reason we have fewest cases in Europe is because 1 - huge vaccine programme, 2 - lockdown and 3 - very high levels of natural immunity due to Kent COVID.
The testing programme isn't relevant in any of these. You're adding up 2+2 and saying the answer is a banana.
1, 2, 3 and 4 Testing are all relevant factors.
The vast majority of the public are still unvaccinated and we aren't the only country in Europe with a lockdown or restrictions. The idea testing is having zero impact on isolation, just because we don't have GPS trackers, is ridiculous.
Seriously Max just think how red-faced your average Labour MP would get about such a suggestion, and to be fair I expect quite a lot of MPs from other parties would be similarly outraged. There was simply no will in the UK for the sort of interventions that would ensure people complied with isolation rules.
The government has an 80 seat majority and an opposition that has no backbone. Make the scientific case for it, implement it and watch cases fall by genuinely huge numbers and reopen the economy. All of the complaints disappear and suddenly the plan is lauded as "the key to avoiding lockdown".
Now if there had only been the same collective will to make people isolate we might have made better use of the testing, but there was essentially no support for forcing people to isolate. We decided to trust people to follow the rules, and surveys say that most of them did not follow the rules. That's the failing, not enough carrot and stick, the testing system itself is doing what we asked of it.
I find it hard to believe that most of the country prefers that everyone is isolated instead of isolating only the infectious.
Seriously Max just think how red-faced your average Labour MP would get about such a suggestion, and to be fair I expect quite a lot of MPs from other parties would be similarly outraged. There was simply no will in the UK for the sort of interventions that would ensure people complied with isolation rules.
No will for giving people money which would help to bring about the end of lockdown but plenty of will for closing the country for months? Huh?
Without the tracking bracelets you are still back to relying on "good will" and "common sense" to ensure people isolate, and they have manifestly failed.
Surely that has been obvious since early January when our death rate went through the roof and massively out of proportion to the number of cases we had (despite the much greater testing)?
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
Pay them 3-5x their salary or a lump sum.
£1k per week and GPS tracking bracelets. Boom.
The cobra effect. Give someone £1000 pw and folk will be out there trying to catch it or be within 2m of someone who has it.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
Testing isn't pointless, no, but the claimed benefits so far of our system is population monitoring and variant monitoring. Both of these can be done with an improved version of the ONS study. If the benefit is limited to those two areas (and I think that's probably about right) then we should build a testing system around that as it would be about 5% of the annual cost.
Why have you defined the benefits like that? Have you had a test yourself? If so, did you feel any benefit from it?
Just watched a Reiner Fuellmich Berlin interview on Youtube. Spouting nonsense about "Gates/great reset" amongst other things. The interesting thing is the like ratio, the vid has 4k likes to 50 dislikes (One of the dislikes is my own) - it rather suggests that either i) People watching this tripe don't actually do much thinking for themselves and listen to what they want to hear about it all being a huge conspiracy or ii) I'm atypical in looking down rabbit holes on the other side of the argument.
Does he have a point on asymptomatic spread ? I'm not sure but if you accept his alternate hypothesis that the superspreader lady was taking flu medication when she flew from China to Germany, the alternate hypothesis that there's enough shitty or desperate people to carry on what they're doing even with symptons in the middle of a pandemic is as good an argument for mass mask indoor use during a pandemic as the asymptomatic spread one.
And yet the country in Europe with the most testing and the most vaccines has by very far the fewest Covid cases. Despite most of the public still being unvaccinated of course.
The pandemic is costing us a trillion. It is World War levels of expenditure. In a World War you don't penny pinch on munitions.
The reason we have fewest cases in Europe is because 1 - huge vaccine programme, 2 - lockdown and 3 - very high levels of natural immunity due to Kent COVID.
The testing programme isn't relevant in any of these. You're adding up 2+2 and saying the answer is a banana.
1, 2, 3 and 4 Testing are all relevant factors.
The vast majority of the public are still unvaccinated and we aren't the only country in Europe with a lockdown or restrictions. The idea testing is having zero impact on isolation, just because we don't have GPS trackers, is ridiculous.
Testing is a completely irrelevant factor in this. Lockdown and vaccines are, again I'd like to see any scientific or statistical evidence of testing being a factor because it hasn't been so far throughout the pandemic. I highly doubt it would suddenly become one at the same coincidental time as we went into lockdown and started mass vaccinations.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
Testing isn't pointless, no, but the claimed benefits so far of our system is population monitoring and variant monitoring. Both of these can be done with an improved version of the ONS study. If the benefit is limited to those two areas (and I think that's probably about right) then we should build a testing system around that as it would be about 5% of the annual cost.
Why have you defined the benefits like that? Have you had a test yourself? If so, did you feel any benefit from it?
It's what the benefits were defined as by its defenders in this thread and by Prof. Whitty in the committee.
I have had a test, it was negative and absolutely horrible.
For the "it was an emergency! the pandemic justifies taking risks!" crowd I have one, to me, very obvious question: the successful pandemic projects have been those where money was given to groups with expertise (vaccine development most obviously) and they were told to do whatever it takes. Why was the T&T money not given (even in part) to the existing public health infrastructure, which already had experience in this area on a smaller scale?
Smaller scale is really underplaying it. The existing public health system has nothing like the capability required to deal with COVID-19. We are doing an absolutely incredible amount of testing now, and not any old rubbish but gold-standard PCR tests. So even if you used the public health teams, you would still need to spend a fortune on testing, and still need to recruit tens of thousands of people to expand the existing services.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
In fact, the reason that they went outside the existing infrastructure for testing was that the people running the existing test infrastructure said they couldn't expand to mass testing - it would take multiple years.
Sure, but then they appear to have ignored the existing expertise when it came to the "trace" part of the T&T system. It’s no accident that local authorities, with no money, managed to vastly outperform the national T&T system; eventually the disparity became so obvious that the government allocated funding directly to local authorities for the purpose.
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
Test and trace is pointless without effective isolation. The hotel industry is on it’s knees with thousands of empty rooms. People have been trusted to self isolate. Case numbers prove that many haven’t. It’s still not too late to ensure secure isolation in hotels for confirmed cases and all travellers from overseas. An earlier end to lockdown, so that we are back in business before the rest of Europe would pay for it. But it’s probably a different budget, so can’t be done.
Testing is not pointless. Tracing without more coercive isolation might be. The alternative, for a free liberal society, is of course encouraging people to isolate by other means but that was clearly deemed to be unworkable.
Pay them 3-5x their salary or a lump sum.
£1k per week and GPS tracking bracelets. Boom.
The cobra effect. Give someone £1000 pw and folk will be out there trying to catch it or be within 2m of someone who has it.
Absolutely. That's the moral hazard - tell young people that the virus isn't dangerous to them but if they catch it they get paid a grand a week. That's not going to cause isolations.
Seriously Max just think how red-faced your average Labour MP would get about such a suggestion, and to be fair I expect quite a lot of MPs from other parties would be similarly outraged. There was simply no will in the UK for the sort of interventions that would ensure people complied with isolation rules.
No will for giving people money which would help to bring about the end of lockdown but plenty of will for closing the country for months? Huh?
Without the tracking bracelets you are still back to relying on "good will" and "common sense" to ensure people isolate, and they have manifestly failed.
One is "My Truth", as use by Oprah. To me that means "My Opinion".
Another was on R4 earlier - the idea that a personal account of a personal experience is beyond question, and must be accepted as revealed truth. To me - that's just a no; of course it must be tested, especially when not self-consistent.
I'll have a bash. I like these sort of convoluted linguistic issues.
It means my take rather than my opinion. The substitution of "truth" for "take" is a suitable innovation for where it's a person talking about how something has affected them, how it's come across, made them feel, this sort of thing. Because here it requires and deserves added weight over and above "take". And certainly "opinion" is not right.
To illustrate: Woman describes how she feels belittled herself when male colleagues talk about female celebs in an objectified and contemptuous manner.
That is not "her opinion", it is "her take". But "her take" is not quite strong enough. It makes it sound as if her offering on the matter is just one of many to be considered equally. We need something to elevate it. Her Truth. It works.
Question begged. What about the men in my example? One of them now gives his side, says it's not that often, and we talk about lots of other things, she's being a snowflake etc. So is that His Truth?
Answer: No. It isn't. That (rightly) stays at the level of "his take". Why? Because His (or Her) Truth is restricted to those who are punching up. Or not punching, just explaining in this case, but you know what I mean.
So, with the Meghan interview, I'd say there was a hotchpotch of her opinions, her takes, and her truths.
That's my take on My Truth.
That seems unnecessarily convoluted. I cant really see how comprehension or empathy is advanced by such linguistic contortions.
Especially when the opinion of people commenting on such issues is intentionally steered by participants of whatever stripe to black and white perceptions of fact.
'Truth is restricted to those who are punching up' seems like another example of something that needs to be explained that it does not mean what it looks like it means, and that never helps. And who decides what is up or down?
Some things are complicated. We don't need to make them more complicated than needed.
In a society where we claim to believe that people are equal no-one should be - or should think themselves - immune from criticism, regardless of where they are in any hierarchy.
And yet the country in Europe with the most testing and the most vaccines has by very far the fewest Covid cases. Despite most of the public still being unvaccinated of course.
The pandemic is costing us a trillion. It is World War levels of expenditure. In a World War you don't penny pinch on munitions.
The reason we have fewest cases in Europe is because 1 - huge vaccine programme, 2 - lockdown and 3 - very high levels of natural immunity due to Kent COVID.
The testing programme isn't relevant in any of these. You're adding up 2+2 and saying the answer is a banana.
1, 2, 3 and 4 Testing are all relevant factors.
The vast majority of the public are still unvaccinated and we aren't the only country in Europe with a lockdown or restrictions. The idea testing is having zero impact on isolation, just because we don't have GPS trackers, is ridiculous.
Testing is a completely irrelevant factor in this. Lockdown and vaccines are, again I'd like to see any scientific or statistical evidence of testing being a factor because it hasn't been so far throughout the pandemic. I highly doubt it would suddenly become one at the same coincidental time as we went into lockdown and started mass vaccinations.
Agreed, but the testing does at least provide a high level of reassurance that there isn't a new surge of cases somewhere under the radar.
Comments
One of my daughter's friends was employed by T&T. She had so little work to do that she eventually quit out of boredom. It was not efficient. No government program of that scale is ever going to be. It was stupid not to take isolation more seriously. It was absolutely urgent and built from scratch remarkably quickly.
On topic: the betting markets must be factoring in the possibility of high structural unemployment and all the nasty decisions the Government has to make about tax and spending when this is all over. There's a very long way to go until the next election, but demographic change, the Scottish situation and Labour's shrunken voter coalition all favour the Tories. Another Conservative victory has to be the odds-on favourite in all of this, and where Labour is meant to conjure an overall majority from Lord alone knows.
they'll all just disappear in to the woodwork like the "experts" who demanded we have 100,000s of respirators
The target it was run with was Johnson's pledge to test 100,000 people a day. So we have a system that can test huge numbers of people every day and it's very successful at that.
But the target should have been to prevent onward transmission by isolating as large a proportion of infectious people for as large a proportion of the time that they are infectious as possible. We have no idea precisely how useless it was at that because the government isn't even attempting to measure that.
Even lockdown decisions have been made on the basis of hospital admissions, rather than the testing numbers, so it's not had any utility there in acting in advance of problems.
It seems a bit rich to call people out because the government decided to piss £37billion up the wall instead.
You're contrasting test and trace with some fictionalised "serious isolation system" that you have been an advocate of from the beginning but that fictionalised system didn't exist here or anywhere else in the West. That's got nothing to do with test and trace whatsoever, that's to do with the country not having the willpower to take isolation as seriously as you wanted.
If the pandemic is lengthened then please name a European or properly equivalent to the UK country that ended the pandemic months before us?
Why do you think T&T suddenly has anything to do with it, after months of achieving nothing?
It will all go into the "money spent on beating covid" pot, which will be met by a shrug at worst or a cheer at best.
Labour shouldn't waste their time on this in my opinion.
It means my take rather than my opinion. The substitution of "truth" for "take" is a suitable innovation for where it's a person talking about how something has affected them, how it's come across, made them feel, this sort of thing. Because here it requires and deserves added weight over and above "take". And certainly "opinion" is not right.
To illustrate: Woman describes how she feels belittled herself when male colleagues talk about female celebs in an objectified and contemptuous manner.
That is not "her opinion", it is "her take". But "her take" is not quite strong enough. It makes it sound as if her offering on the matter is just one of many to be considered equally. We need something to elevate it. Her Truth. It works.
Question begged. What about the men in my example? One of them now gives his side, says it's not that often, and we talk about lots of other things, she's being a snowflake etc. So is that His Truth?
Answer: No. It isn't. That (rightly) stays at the level of "his take". Why? Because His (or Her) Truth is restricted to those who are punching up. Or not punching, just explaining in this case, but you know what I mean.
So, with the Meghan interview, I'd say there was a hotchpotch of her opinions, her takes, and her truths.
That's my take on My Truth.
Its not been a silver bullet. That's not the same thing at all.
Our verdict: The 2020/21 budget for Test and Trace in England is £22 billion, but only £4 billion was spent by the end of October 2020. Most of this is spending on testing, rather than tracing.
Just having people check and measure whether people were complying would have made some difference, and at least we'd know what the challenge was.
Could you do Test & Trace cheaper and better? For sure. How about much cheaper and much better? Probably not. If you wanted a much cheaper and better Test & Trace you would have had to start from a completely different position to the one we were in.
Many countries paid some money to buy vaccines - and assumed that they were just another medicine to be fed into their national healthcare systems.
If you want to vaccination 0.5%+ (or even 1%) of your population per day, then you need a different kind of effort. Not just buying the vaccines like aspirin. Not just investing in production. But setting up a national level infrastructure to take the vaccines, distribute them, find the people to vaccinate, vaccinate them once, and then find them again to do the second dose.
My wife got a phone call (what seemed like) every single day while she was isolating.
New people were needed.
Feiglding almost sounds like it could be a German word for some nefarious activity.
https://twitter.com/jordanschachtel/status/1369488647028871174?s=21
The pandemic is going to join Brexit as a settled topic which most voters want to put behind them. If Labour is to have a future then it has to look to the future, not the past.
To get back into the game Labour needs three things: for the Conservatives to stuff up the economic recovery, to detoxify itself with small-c conservative voters, and a clear alternative vision of what it would do differently. It can't do anything about point 1, and points 2 and 3 are both big challenges that require careful thought. Devoting undue time to criticisms that the Government can easily swat away would be pointless.
I`ve been laying LP majority for a while now. I can`t believe you can still lay it at 4.8. I would want over 10/1 if I was backing Lab.
I would draw a distinction with other restrictions and nightclubs which is June.
Going back to the thread header this spat is a good reason why betting against Johnson seems a reasonable bet at the moment. After the relief will come the anger and this could be a tidal wave.
If a government that presided over 150,000 deaths and a Brexit that by conservative estimates will cost 4% in growth and 100, 000 jobs gets away with it then we are indeed a country of Hartlepudlians.
I am perfectly willing to accept there are some benefits to having advance warning as to when and where hospital admissions are going to start rising, or picking up new variants of the virus, but I can see zero evidence that T&T is contributing to the restrictions being lifted a single day ahead of when they otherwise would be.
https://twitter.com/ManfredWeber/status/1369548396516802563
It’s also not clear (as others have rightly pointed out) that all that testing infrastructure was necessary - what’s the point in testing 100,000s of people daily if you can’t act on the results? None.
The justification for T&T was that it would come into it’s own after the initial lock down & prevent another surge. It utterly failed at this, at vast expense. People defending this baffle me.
A ONS style survey is fine for the population as a whole, if you simply want to know how much disease is out there, but if you to want to identify cases you need to test individuals, and we can now apply that testing to essentially everybody who wants a test.
To put it into context the last report into this by SAGE estimated that T&T was reducing R by the same amount school closures were. So in a parallel universe where T&T didn't exist we'd now have the same number of cases as we would have had if the schools had been open for the last couple of months.
And to get the same R reduction now if T&T didn't exist we'd still need schools closed.
There's a big gap between doing nothing and doing everything. The reality is that most things we do are "doing something" which is a much less interesting story.
School closures didn't end the pandemic, but they helped.
T&T didn't end the pandemic, but it helped.
I'd rather have T&T than school closures.
Camilla got awful press for a very long while.
The fundamental issue it seems to me - from the outside anyway - is that H&M thought they should be more important than they are, should change the monarchy etc and did not realise or want to realise that they are fundamentally rather unimportant when the heir to the heir has three children already. It would be like the Duke of Kent informing George VI that he ought to have a say in what the monarchy should be like because he had married a glamorous and very beautiful exotic Greek wife. Any changes to the monarchy would be decided by HMQ, Charles and William and Kate, not others whose job would be to go along with it. Either put up or get out. They've got out and lashing out about what happened seems sad, more than anything else. A slimmed down monarchy is best for all concerned but does mean that the supporting parts don't get to star on stage. H&M didn't want to be supporting parts to the rather duller William and Kate.
Vaccinations are reducing R by about 0.03 per week.
T&T (from memory) is reducing R by 0.3
So T&T is doing the same as 10 weeks of vaccinations in reducing R. But the 10 weeks of vaccinations are building upon T&T not instead of it.
He was found because he phoned 111 himself
Oh, and he also makes the standard EU = Europe mistake, tsk tsk.
May not be any use but who knows
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Yes, probably.
How much is the pandemic costing us per week?
But avoiding lockdown will be considered to be a very narrow metric of success.
The pandemic is costing us a trillion. It is World War levels of expenditure. In a World War you don't penny pinch on munitions.
The WHO metric for a pandemic "under control" is a positivity rate below 5%.
So that's us, and (barely) Greece.....
Which was itself a function of their highly devolved health infrastructure.
Which is wonderful for tracing contacts. Absolutely disastrous for mass vaccination of an entire population.
Local councils' already existent public and environmental health officials were sidelined here, instead of scaled up to deal with the trace and isolate bit.
Quite why this was is the burning question.
We decided as a country, with across the board support, that everybody who wants a test should get one, that the tests should be the best possible, and that the person tested should get their results as soon as possible. We built a system to do that, at enormous expense.
Now if there had only been the same collective will to make people isolate we might have made better use of the testing, but there was essentially no support for forcing people to isolate. We decided to trust people to follow the rules, and surveys say that most of them did not follow the rules. That's the failing, not enough carrot and stick, the testing system itself is doing what we asked of it.
Especially when the opinion of people commenting on such issues is intentionally steered by participants of whatever stripe to black and white perceptions of fact.
'Truth is restricted to those who are punching up' seems like another example of something that needs to be explained that it does not mean what it looks like it means, and that never helps. And who decides what is up or down?
Some things are complicated. We don't need to make them more complicated than needed.
The testing programme isn't relevant in any of these. You're adding up 2+2 and saying the answer is a banana.
https://twitter.com/ITVChannelTV/status/1369610072079405059?s=20
(a) Is unavoidable but its about 24-48h for a test turnaround during which time people are supposed to self-isolate while awaiting the results. Your (a) is why test and trace can't be a silver bullet on its own, but it doesn't mean it has zero impact on transmission.
(b) True again, but again not being perfect doesn't mean zero impact on transmission. Do you really believe people are having zero isolation compared to what they would have after a positive test? Seriously?
(c) That's true, but again not being perfect doesn't mean we can't have an estimate.
The overwhelming majority of this country is still unvaccinated, and we vaccinated the vulnerable shielding people first, yet we have the lowest case rate in Europe. While doing the most tests in Europe. Why is that?
Do you seriously believe that testing has had ZERO impact on transmission and the entire reason are mostly unvaccinated public has very few cases is just due to vaccine impacts?
I feel like it's months since I made this point. But it was made repeatedly at the time by numerous posters. It was never very obscure.
The vast majority of the public are still unvaccinated and we aren't the only country in Europe with a lockdown or restrictions. The idea testing is having zero impact on isolation, just because we don't have GPS trackers, is ridiculous.
Or is he just a journalist?
i) People watching this tripe don't actually do much thinking for themselves and listen to what they want to hear about it all being a huge conspiracy or
ii) I'm atypical in looking down rabbit holes on the other side of the argument.
Does he have a point on asymptomatic spread ? I'm not sure but if you accept his alternate hypothesis that the superspreader lady was taking flu medication when she flew from China to Germany, the alternate hypothesis that there's enough shitty or desperate people to carry on what they're doing even with symptons in the middle of a pandemic is as good an argument for mass mask indoor use during a pandemic as the asymptomatic spread one.
I have had a test, it was negative and absolutely horrible.
No obligation.