'World-beating' test-and-trace system

The chris, I have no answers. However, you don't abandon a good strategy because people are flouting the law. You arrest em. fine em, or bang em all up in splendid isolation for 14 days.
 
Track and trace will only be effective if the surrounding messaging and guidence compliments it. Unfortunately we do not have that due to the events of the past few weeks.

It is a good stratagy in theory, but we seem hell bent on kicking the chair out from under it before it begins.
 
We are all a bit frustrated Chris, too much lockdown, not enough lockdown. I think what we can mostly all agree on is the covid response has been lacking in several areas.

Man I shoulda been a politician. :)
 
A leaked email from the chief executive of Serco, tasked with contact tracing, revealed he doubted the scheme would evolve smoothly, but said he wanted it to “cement the position of the private sector” in the NHS supply chain

https://www.theguardian.com/society...e-operating-fully-until-september-coronavirus

So this 'world-beating' system that, according to Boris Johnson, has been operating smoothly since last week, won't actually be ready until September/October.

Another amazing achievement from our Dear Leader.
 
The track and trace system is not worthless. It is just that the computer app is not working properly yet so the system is virtually a manual one.
Having worked in IT, it is patently obvious that to promise these systems to be "world class" by a certain time when the analysis, programming and testing of the system has not been completed is asking for embarrassment.
 
The track and trace system is not worthless. It is just that the computer app is not working properly yet so the system is virtually a manual one.
Having worked in IT, it is patently obvious that to promise these systems to be "world class" by a certain time when the analysis, programming and testing of the system has not been completed is asking for embarrassment.
Hmm, ignoring the mobile app, the manual track and trace system has no mechanism for localised reactions to covid hotspots. This is THE most important part of track and trace. It allows localised lcokdowns and strategies to deal with localised outbreaks.

If this doesn't work, it is pretty much worthless. It will allow you to try and contain outbreaks but that is based on trust with the people you have contacted following the isolation advice.

It has no mechanism to analyse the data coming in and look for hotspots.
 
Hmm, ignoring the mobile app, the manual track and trace system has no mechanism for localised reactions to covid hotspots. This is THE most important part of track and trace. It allows localised lcokdowns and strategies to deal with localised outbreaks.

If this doesn't work, it is pretty much worthless. It will allow you to try and contain outbreaks but that is based on trust with the people you have contacted following the isolation advice.

It has no mechanism to analyse the data coming in and look for hotspots.

Entirely agree with this. The whole approach of the government to contact tracing has made no sense from the start.

Local authorities and Public Health England already employ people whose jobs include elements of contact tracing, through dealing either with food poisoning incidents or STDs. These people are therefore experienced, trained and have adequate data handling protocols to have played a significant role in contact training for Covid-19. As they are locally based, it would also have enabled the identification of hotspots as you suggest.

For the government to have simply cut these organisations out of the picture and go straight to a private sector company with no experience of delivering such a system, who have then recruited people with no experience of undertaking the task, makes no sense whatsoever. Apart from the usual reasons why they would award a contract to their private sector mates, of course.
 
At risk of sounding incredibly naive, what was at risk by sourcing applications already in use worldwide for this function? It's my understanding that South Korea has a well functioning (world-beating?) application in place. If I were procuring a system to fit this profile that supplier would be towards the top of my list of contacts.
 
At risk of sounding incredibly naive, what was at risk by sourcing applications already in use worldwide for this function? It's my understanding that South Korea has a well functioning (world-beating?) application in place. If I were procuring a system to fit this profile that supplier would be towards the top of my list of contacts.

The risk was that certain people wouldnt make any money.
 
At risk of sounding incredibly naive, what was at risk by sourcing applications already in use worldwide for this function? It's my understanding that South Korea has a well functioning (world-beating?) application in place. If I were procuring a system to fit this profile that supplier would be towards the top of my list of contacts.
The risk is the API might not allow Dominic Cummings and his mates to harvest your data
 
Buy before build is an architectural concept that the government ignored, probably for the reasons mentioned.
 
Entirely agree with this. The whole approach of the government to contact tracing has made no sense from the start.

Local authorities and Public Health England already employ people whose jobs include elements of contact tracing, through dealing either with food poisoning incidents or STDs. These people are therefore experienced, trained and have adequate data handling protocols to have played a significant role in contact training for Covid-19. As they are locally based, it would also have enabled the identification of hotspots as you suggest.

For the government to have simply cut these organisations out of the picture and go straight to a private sector company with no experience of delivering such a system, who have then recruited people with no experience of undertaking the task, makes no sense whatsoever. Apart from the usual reasons why they would award a contract to their private sector mates, of course.
This is exactly how it works, I use a government system for work, it is woeful.

to the degree that I can log out of one client account, log in as a completely different user and after the initial log in page i am in the account of the original. It’s a massive data protection flaw and after YEARS they still haven’t addressed it.

One of the tasks calls for what is affectively a nil input, I have to go through the whole process and at the end input that this is a nil submission, it takes 20 minutes because the input is so clunky. No advice was taken from likely users who could have streamlined and made it so much more effective.

The portal was to replace a paper system, but takes longer now, is often crashing and it took two years just for the system to become reasonably reliable. It was offline for two weeks recently causing chaos in the industry.
 
This is yet another example of why Johnson isn’t suitable to be Prime Minister, he keeps making promises that he simply can’t keep and then backtracking on them or deflecting from them with another pledge that can’t be achieved, this isn’t ideological it is simply incompetence and shows that leadership and steering are not his forte, lives are at stake here, giving false hope is not good governance, setting out a timeframe for easing lockdown and then not having the measures in place that were promised for those restrictions to be lifted is dangerous and disingenuous.
 
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