What can you buy with £37 billion?

Crikey, a few people need to either a) have a beer and chill out or b) stop drinking and go to bed.
 
newusername said:
What should 124,147,198 tests have cost?

I had involvement in setting up 2 testing locations. 1 was mobile & basically a transit van & marquee in a car park so easy, the other was a "permanent" testing site & the first of its design in England. The project was lead by Deloitte & the site was going to be operated by Sodexo. In between were a load of local contractors groundworkers, fencers, electricians, modular builders etc. We met onsite on Thursday & the location was approved, legals completed Friday & site handed over on Saturday morning. The following Sunday it was handed over to Sodexo & they began testing people on the Monday. It has been there over six months now testing 1,200 people a day, seven days a week.

A friend said similarly rapid pace construction has gone on to create & certify "Containment Level 2 +" labs (I think Covid samples should be dealt with in CL3 labs but the Govt relaxed rules to allow them to be worked in CL2 labs as long as they were kept in the appropriate safety cabinet) to create capacity to test all the samples produced.

Doing that is expensive.
Doing it quickly is expensive.
Running it 7 days a week is expensive.

The Govt can be criticised, they'd defunded public health & local authorities for 10 years, they hadn't planned for an eventuality like this despite the recent outbreaks of SARS, MARS, Swine Flu etc. and so we started from a self-inflicted low base and a lot of the spending is on temporary infrastructure & so when this pandemic is over, it will be dismantled & won't be available if Covid-22 comes along.

But we were in a global pandemic & needed to act quickly. If they'd put everything out to tender & saved 20% it would still have cost £29.6BN but how many more lives would've been lost to do so.
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A far more effective way would have been to provide the NHS the funding to perform test and trace at a regional level. It would have been faster, more efficient and direct with people who already specialise in providing a front line service and were already doing a better job at tracing people.

We did not need to put anything to tender at all and we did not need Dido Harding's involvement. Just how many more lives were lost due to wasting time on Serco?
 
Chris_Boro said:
A far more effective way would have been to provide the NHS the funding to perform test and trace at a regional level. It would have been faster, more efficient and direct with people who already specialise in providing a front line service and were already doing a better job at tracing people.

We did not need to put anything to tender at all and we did not need Dido Harding's involvement. Just how many more lives were lost due to wasting time on Serco?
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All 12 NE local authorities operate under the Local Tracing Partnership and most of them have been doing so for many months. Granted this was not always the case, but that was as much to do with workforce resource availability as much as anything. It was only when lockdown has been enforced that staff could be redeployed to do T&T at a local level
 
The testing regime is a white elephant, unfortunately. It was meant to direct governmental strategy during the pandemic. For example, it should drive decisions about lockdown, or moving through tiers. What Johnson actually did, after wasting our money, was wait until the NHS were becoming overwhelmed, then locked down. That required no test, track and trace, at all.37 billion watsed, because it has never been used for the purpose it was designed for,

Furthermore Johnson is directly responsible for tens of thousands of lives by ignoring a system for which he stole billions of pounds for.
 
Remember when you coukd buy bazzuka sweets for a penny, well you could get £37b of em, how many would that be, crickey 🙄
 
I saw a nice 3 bedroom detached villa, with a pool, in Portugal on the telly for £370,000.

We could have 10,000 3 bedroom villas, with a pool on the Algarve!
 
Laughing said:
The testing regime is a white elephant, unfortunately. It was meant to direct governmental strategy during the pandemic. For example, it should drive decisions about lockdown, or moving through tiers. What Johnson actually did, after wasting our money, was wait until the NHS were becoming overwhelmed, then locked down. That required no test, track and trace, at all.37 billion watsed, because it has never been used for the purpose it was designed for,

Furthermore Johnson is directly responsible for tens of thousands of lives by ignoring a system for which he stole billions of pounds for.
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Allocated budget isn't spend but I agree the Government acted too slowly in the intial stages & then had to ramp up everything far beyond what they would've had to do if they had been organised in the first place. Countries with far better infection & death stats spent far far less on testing as they'd managed to get hold of the infection immediately.
 
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