The UK response - Part II - read OP

Unless there is a significant and unsustainable number of people in hospitals, then it is time to start ignoring daily cases really.

There are many rhinoviruses. They mostly cause the common cold, but they can cause very severe infections, particularly in the very young, the very old and the immunocompromised. Severe cases can develop complications, including bacterial infections and pneumonia.

Will be curious to see what sort of reaction there is. It would be nice to think that some key learnings can be taken from it as opposed to it been shot down by those involved.

Curious to know why you expect case numbers to drop down to 20k? Have they even been that low at any stage over the past few months?

Sounds a bit brutal, but at least probably 20K / day for the last 4 months who would not take the jab yet have been effectively jabbed without even taking it. Quite a lot when you think about it.

Seems a lab in the UK has wrongly given out 43,000 PCR negative results, there also seems to be question marks over the company's suitability for the contract they were awarded;

https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1448933287796281365

That thread is absolutely shocking. Good God.

From The Guardian article linked above;

Obviously those are today's figures and things would have been different a year ago but it would seem there could have been hundreds of other companies who would have been in the frame for this contract. While many of those probably had little experience of PCR testing at the time, that wouldn't have put them at a disadvantage against the company who did get the contract given their lack of experience.

The UK has strikingly higher per-million infection rates than comparable European countries. This is not simply an artefact of the UK doing more testing than other European countries, since the UK has also has strikingly higher per-million hospitalisation rates, and strikingly higher per-million death rates.

Unquestionably, therefore, the UK has a bigger covid problem than it could have. Scaling back testing might help to mask this, or at least to distract attention from it, but it will do nothing to address the problem. And it's a real problem with real and serious consequences that include avoidable deaths, so distracting attention from it is not a good idea. The more data you have about this, the easier it is going to be to understand why the UK has such a problem, and therefore how to address it effectively. A policy of not gathering data doesn't look wise to me.

Having said that, it may well be that the testing regime in schools in particular needs review; that it imposes more burdens than is justified by the data that it yields. But the account attributed to the Telegraph report seems pretty incoherent to me: "You are asking completely healthy children to test, with the potential to be excluded (from school) . . .". If they are completely healthy, on what basis might they be excluded from school? Is the report using "completely healthy" to mean "asymptomatic, but possibly infected and possibly infectious"? If the testing shows them to be infectious, that would look like a good reason to exclude them from school.

My position on the need to have a reasonable level of visibility when it comes to the prevalence of Covid throughout the UK and my opinion on the mass testing of school children seem like quite separate topics to me to be honest.

Pillar 1 capacity was generally in the region of 70-80,000 so your figures are a bit out of date. But imagine if in march/April last year, some of those billions spaffed on private cowb..., sorry, operators, had been put instead into investing in and developing the already existing network of facilities and expertise, like they were doing in most other countries, imagine where they might have been. Might have avoided all those tests been posted abroad or binned, the huge issues about data provision that fatally undermined the whole test and trace operation, as well as the myriad other problems they encountered for a start. Sure, who knows?

The thing is, back in late spring last year, i think the kind of questions a lot of people in UK health were asking was how can we tackle this health crisis most effectively, what's the most efficient use of our resources to ensure we get on top of the situation asap and limit the already too severe toll it has taken? Where does our expertise lie and how to best utilise it etc

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall as part of that conversation giving billions to private operators and concluding that even if it all went wrong, 100s of thousands of tests bungled, test data fatally not shared with public health bodies, people in some cases having to drive 100s of miles to access tests despite their "world leading" system etc, it would all be worth it because a few hundred jobs would be created and we could trot out this blather about great British science and innovation.

So they splurge all these billions on test and trace while at the same time creating a two tier system where the private labs cannot share their data with the public health bodies that need them, basically hobbling the whole test and trace effort from the outset.

And this makes sense because...???

If by "outcome" you mean the purported "world beating" test & trace system that turned out to be anything but, then yes, i most certainly object to the outcome. Reading your posts feels like entering some parallel universe where the plucky nhs amateurs had to step aside while the slick professionals came in and took over the show with all their mastery and know how. And how did that end up? Chaos, bungling incompetence, blatant cronyism, thousands of preventable or premature deaths - or as you refer to it, the "outcome."

It didn't have to be that way, they weren't forced down that road. It was a choice to put all community testing and tracing in the hands of private operators for reasons that I've yet to see adequately explained. The nhs labs were expanded to 70-80,000 capacity, rarely if ever fully utilised, and could have been expanded further if given the go ahead and the resources. There is simply no reason why they couldn't. If you'd read previous posts carefully, you'd know I have no qualms with private firms being used. Of course, the nhs couldn't do It all on its own. That goes without saying. But as the record shows, it was the nhs that performed its assigned tasks with impressive efficiency while the lavishly endowed private operators delivered a grim catalogue of incompetence and failure and yet it was the former that remained under utilised. Go figure.