I'll start with PPE
the On One mk 3 variety of course!
Misread the title – I thought it was sandal of choice 😄
Our fellow citizens?
Track and trace. Billions of pounds to app development and programmers which amounted to something akin to my O level computer studies project. For which i was awarded a U grade and subsequently named Charles Babbage by my peers.
Re: t&t app. I know the project lead from the palantir side of things. He’s pretty despondent about ever working with our glorious leadership again.
The millions that are being given to towns around me. Very little democratic involvement, spending decided by panels made up of local businesses. Guess where they spend the money!
On the other hand the Zoe Covid Sympton app was an excellent piece of work and through it they were miles ahead of the government on the changing symptoms.
A fantastic example of citizenship science at work.
Still being called working class after buying German whips on finance.
Track and trace.
Just checked my uniform and its called Test and Trace. And we on the testing side got dragged into the crapstorm that the tech overlords created.
EDIT: But yeah, PPE.
Can we have an old fashioned one?
Leaving your Daily Mail columnist wife to hit the gay chemsex scene hard and moving in with your much younger male aide?
One day those pictures will leak 😳
Track and Trace for sure. It's easy to get hung up on the money- and no wonder, in a saner timeline that'd have been government-ending by itself.
But the real scandal is that it didn't work, at a time when it had to work. In fact they seemed to forget one of the major things it was supposed to do entirely. Track and trace isn't just supposed to be telling people they might have covid, it was supposed to track the disease, and enable smarter public policy. And as far as I can tell, the UK level testing just never did. Never tried to.
There was a really odd moment when Scotland started diverging from the national immigration strategies, and westminster- Raab, IIRC- responded that they should wait 2 weeks for the next UK review and were jumping the gun. The scottish government were able to say, our track and trace works, we know what's driving the cases and we know that this change will reduce it. And westminster wasn't putting them down, or anything- they just didn't grasp that this was possible. They'd accepted guesswork and delays and responding to everything 2 weeks late as the best they could possibly have- because their system was world beating and it couldn't do better. We could target individual superspreader pubs ffs.
How much difference that really made, is hard to tell, since the UK government would still have acted badly even with perfect information. Especially on immigration, since they blatantly reopened immigration from some places entirely for political reasons. But it's still bloody awful.
Track and Trace for sure.
Yeah but
Just checked my uniform and its called Test and Trace. And we on the testing side got dragged into the crapstorm that the tech overlords created.
I know it was a shitstorm, but can we make sure we have the right shitstorm.
The other point is that local authorities had existing tracing programmes in place that "might" have helped gain us a few days time at the beginning. Possibly. But, you know, people have had enough of experts.
I'm going to keep calling it the thing that absolutely everyone calls it tbh.
Also, my mk1 26er wasn't good for me, Brant said it'd be fine to fit a 130mm fork and it rode like crap like that. But my green ano 29er with rigid forks was an absolute flyer. I'd still have it if not for fatbikes. The new one looks great but I got a Loco Moto instead
I’m going to keep calling it the thing that absolutely everyone calls it tbh.
You plan may be working. I've certainly called it that after a few beers. 🙂
“Track and trace. Billions of pounds to app development and programmers which amounted to something akin to my O level computer studies project.”
The reality:
- a £37b budget (over 2 years)
- actual spend in year 1 was £13.5b against budget of £22.2B
- year 2 underspend is greater
- total spend on the test and trace app was iro £76 million - of which c£35m was the failed attempt by NHS digital to write its own app before apple / Google effectively mandated governments had to use their own app
- c85% of the spend went on “test” including additional lab capacity, test stations, reagents, logistics etc etc. you know - the stuff that the population used 500-600m times.
The cost per test has been reported as commensurate with the amount spent per test in other countries.
So what’s a peak STW conspiracy / “bungs to mates” actually turns out to be an audited (national audit office) underspend of £10B+ against budget and in line with the amounts spent by other countries.
the population used 500-600m times
I remember that day. It was hectic.
Two very different orgs. NHSD flat out refused to be involved as they knew it would be a car crash.
total spend on the test and trace app was iro £76 million – of which c£35m was the failed attempt by
NHS digitalNHSX to write its own app before apple / Google effectively mandated governments had to use their own app
The scandal of test & trace is that the governmens obsession with outsourcing and centralisation meant that they took the equipment to run the tests from research institutes and universities up and down the country.... And then let them sit in warehouses in Milton Keynes for 3 months, while Serco & Deloitte services scraped the bottom of the barrel to get staff to run them at ridiculously low wages.... With predicable results
Ironically in our last lab meeting before lockdown we discussed whether we should turn ourselves into a testing lab as it was obvious this was something the country needed right away and we could've started pretty quickly , in the end the army came and took our qpcr machines for the centralised outsourced clusterfdge of t&t
Likewise clinical colleagues were begging for scrubs, goggles, masks and sanitizer from fashion companies, schools and research institutes- including ours - whilst Matt Hancock stood on TV and said there were no shortages , that week we had just sent all our goggle to St Marks and helped Jerry-rig a sterilzer so they could reuse them using a UV crosslinker
And as for the £5bn in unusable PPE that the Tories got from their dodgy mates, that we ended up burning
Chedarchallenged can come up with whatever numbers he likes, but it most definitely was a colossal scandal
Hancock, Like Hunt before him was/is a colossal prick who failed to listen to anyone remotely qualified and/or experienced and blindly insisted his idiotic ideas were realised.
Try to follow BillMC's link above to the msn story - it has mysteriously disappeared...
Hopefully cheddar will be along soon to offer a perfectly rational 'nothing to see here' explanation 🤣
Luckily you can still find mention of it here: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/boris-johnson-wanted-to-give-carrie-symonds-a-100000-downing-street-role/
https://goodlawproject.org/update/high-court-vip-lane-ppe-unlawful/
This adds to the rich tapestry of deceit
And as for the £5bn in unusable PPE that the Tories got from their dodgy mates, that we ended up burning
Is it all burnt thou or is ton of it still hanging around accruing storage fees 🙂
Isn’t the true scandal is that the games are still being played,like the titanic sinking whilst the band played on.
Is it all burnt thou or is ton of it still hanging around accruing storage fees 🙂
Judging by my inbox a lot of the medical devices they purchased are still sitting around waiting for new homes
