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| COVID-19 deaths per million 7 day rolling average - UK and Europe Source |
COVID-19: Test and Trace boss Dido Harding defends 'essential' £37bn service
Dido Harding said the service was an "an essential component in the fight against COVID" and promised it would be carrying on...
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps defended Test and Trace in an interview with Sky News, saying the pandemic would have been "one heck of a lot worse" without it.
Hard to see how the UK coronavirus debacle could have been "one heck of a lot worse". If anything, it is reasonable to adopt a working assumption that the UK government response probably made things one heck of a lot worse. How else do we explain the miserable numbers compared to most of the rest of the world?
7 comments:
The sequence of events is interesting here. I'd forgotten all about the test and trace stuff, as the news was all about the children going back into school and how many bajillion vaccinations our angels in the envy-of-the-world-NHS had dished out and when we could book our holidays and get a haircut.
Then the Public Accounts Committee point out that the 37bn spent on test and trace was a waste, as it was intended to prevent lockdowns, and it twice failed to do this.
Then suddenly Boris remembers how brilliant test and trace is, and Grant Shapps gets wheeled out to say the same thing with knobs on. Dido Harding herself, though - she who had zero experience in this sort of thing, and appears to have been given the job due to being someone's partner - said that the money spent was justified because the system had to be built from scratch, and that we were now testing more people than other countries were.
That doesn't really address the Committee's concerns, though, does it?
I suppose it could have been "One heck of a lot worse". We could have had two lockdowns and spent a heck of a lot more money on not preventing them.
How could so much be spent on something so ineffective (& pointless)?
One millionth of that vast amount, i.e., £37000, sounds about right for the pathetic results achieved.
Please sack this hopelessly out-of-her-depth honcho, as she IS the trouble.
Dido's lament, "When I am laid to earth, may my bones create no trouble in thy breast".
My lament, "Where's the public audit and inquiry about where all this money has gone".
That is getting close to £1bn per week. How is it possible to spend that much money. The people making the phone calls were on close to minimum wage!
The entire NHS budget is around £130bn, which includes staff, equipment, medicines, maintenance... So how can you rack up a third of that amount on testing and then phoning, or attempting to phone, contacts? A test costs, say, £100, so 80 million tests, as they claim, would cost £8bn. So £29bn on staff? Sounds ludicrous to me
Sam - it's as if test and trace plus the vaccinations were both used to divert attention from what has been a miserable performance in terms of deaths per million. Assuming the numbers are reasonably sound of course.
Ed and Graeme - sounds ludicrous to me too. So much so that I'm cautious about the figures - surely something big is missing. Or maybe it shows just how good governments are at wasting money.
From the film, Independence Day, when the President asks how the secret lab is funded, "You don't think the military actually spend $64,000 on a toilet seat, do you?"
Ed - reminds me of the enormous speaking fees people such as Hillary Clinton attract.
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