England's 'World Beating' System To Track the Virus Is Anything But (nytimes.com) 20
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain unveiled last month a "world beating" operation to track down people who had been exposed to the coronavirus, giving the country a chance to climb out of lockdown without losing sight of where infections were spreading. From a report: As with much of the government's response to the pandemic, however, the results have fallen short of the promises, jeopardizing the reopening of Britain's hobbled economy and risking a second wave of death in one of the countries most debilitated by the virus. In almost three weeks since the start of the system in England, called N.H.S. Test and Trace, some contact tracers have failed to reach a single person, filling their days instead with internet exercise classes and bookshelf organizing. Some call handlers, scattered in offices and homes far from the people they speak with, have mistakenly tried to send patients in England to testing sites across the sea in Northern Ireland.
And a government minister threatened on a conference call to stop coordinating with local leaders on the virus-tracking system if they spoke publicly about its failings, according to three officials briefed on the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Contact tracing was supposed to be the bridge between lockdown and a vaccine, enabling the government to pinpoint clusters of infections as they emerged and to stop infected people from passing on the virus. Without it, a World Health Organization official said recently, England would be remiss in reopening its economy.
And a government minister threatened on a conference call to stop coordinating with local leaders on the virus-tracking system if they spoke publicly about its failings, according to three officials briefed on the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Contact tracing was supposed to be the bridge between lockdown and a vaccine, enabling the government to pinpoint clusters of infections as they emerged and to stop infected people from passing on the virus. Without it, a World Health Organization official said recently, England would be remiss in reopening its economy.
Good old Boris and Dominic (Score:5, Insightful)
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If only it stopped there, between Raab saying today that taking the knee is something out of Game of Thrones and and Matt Hancock confusing Marcus Rashford, a footballer, for Daniel Radcliffe, blaming his mind being on Harry Potter, I honestly wonder if our current government actually does anything other than sit watching Netflix whilst the country goes to hell.
I mean, I'm still waiting for the benefits of Brexit they've been promising us for over 4 years now, I've still yet to see a single one, it's still
Re:Good old Boris and Dominic (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok. No, is the answer. The time taken was to try and get a transitional deal to exit in a proper manner. But that gave opposition the time to oppose the lie filled brexit campaign.
"The current PM and government were elected by a landslide because voters were fed up with everybody fucking about. You can blame BJ for lots of things, but not for delaying the implementation of Brexit."
You can blame him for being an idiot. He campaigned against the transitional deal that T.May put together then when he got into power, he signed it off as an "oven-ready" deal and and that we will leave with a great trade deal, now he says its an awful deal and he's going for a No-deal. He lied and lied and unfortunately our voting public is not much different to Trump supporters where they think applying a hammer to everything is the only way to negotiate but that doesn't work if you haven't got anything to back it up.
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For England, however, Mr. Johnson’s government contracted Serco and another company to hire most of its 25,000 contact tracers, despite Serco having recently been fined £19 million over claims involving a separate contract that it had charged the government for monitoring convicts who were dead, jailed or living outside the country.
So sure, if you contract out your tracing to a sub-standard vendor, you get junk. It's going just as you would expect, with people put on the job with no training, paid far less than the standard wage for this kind of job, and using IT systems that don't fully work. That's what you get when you elect government officials who don't actually know how to govern.
Re:Good old Boris and Dominic (Score:4, Informative)
Matt Hancock, the forgetful health secretary, also falsely claimed that the NHS Digital app had being developed in parallel with the Apple/Google version so the UK government had been backing two horses.
But this claim turned out to be made up because, on May 18th, Hancock previously claimed "There is no alternative app". And Dido Harding and Matt Hancock have been absolutely insistent they had no interest in pursing the Apple-Google model.
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USA's isn't any better. :(
Translation (Score:3)
When Boris Johnson calls something "world beating" what he actually means is "catastrophically fucked up".
Although in this case the failed app did enrich Dominic Cummings' friends so it's not a total failure.
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That is so totally unfair. I remember reruns of the Keystone Cops from when I was a kid, they were world beating as well.
In other news, the UK Government had a mind bogglingly wonderful (my words, but paraphrasing) Coronavirus contact-tracing app. It was cancelled today, they'll use the ones developed by Apple and Android.
I was expecting the Germans to go that way as well but their app was released a couple of days ago and has been downloaded a shedload of times.
Sure (Score:2)
The world beats their thighs, laughing with amusement at Boris' claims.
Two turds in a cesspool (Score:3)
Just like the con artist who tries to convince people he's the best at everything, that whatever he touches turns to gold, Johnson appears to be enamored only by the words he uses and incapable of seeing reality.
Owing to today's software, saying you're going to have a "world class" anything in a month or two, short of a Hell world program, is inviting both disaster and deserved disdain.
"Boasting" is the new "Leadership" (Score:4, Insightful)
It has been for a while now.
I took a look at the TV listings on a whim, since I hadn't watched live TV in a long, long time now, and was wondering how the TV schedulers were handling the lack of new programming now that we're deeper into this Covid-19 era, and even the reality shows are running out of backlog shows.
All the major networks seem to be filling their primetime spots with news shows. The secondary networks are doing lots of marathons, and a few are just using old filler movies to fill gaps even more than usual.
So - in that vacuum, all that extra news both makes it easier to make false flamboyant claims of improvement... but that same news coverage also makes it real, REAL easy for those same claims to be shown wrong. Well, except in cases where tightly controlled Sinclaire shows are the only show left in several cities... but even then, most folks are being exposed to more information than before, just due to the lack of anything else.
So - the usual echo chamber is having interesting side effects - the same old bullshit talking points are repeating until they are meaningless like usual... then some folks are waking up to what they actually mean, and how distorted they are.
Weird times, man.
Ryan Fenton
Well duh (Score:3)
At this point in time they're the 3rd worst affected country in the world. Given the relatively small population of the UK compared to other European countries, or worldwide, that deserves some kind of special medal of incompetence. Especially since the UK is one of the most well equipped nations on Earth to deal with the problem, assuming they had done so.
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But also, yes, the UK comes 4th worldwide in per capita COVID-19 death rate (if you believe the numbers). World beating indeed.
Source: worldometers.info
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The world beating will continue (Score:5, Funny)
Until morale improves.
The little Trump (Score:2)