Two contrasting tweets this morning
Coronavirus: Government admits its Test and Trace programme is unlawful https://t.co/YYcuEKLO7S
— Sky News (@SkyNews) July 20, 2020
And:
Cheap, popular and it works: Ireland's contact-tracing app success. https://t.co/Cdh4jWsDOx
— Paula O'Connor (@NoGoingBack) July 20, 2020
Ireland can get this right.
We can't.
That's not by chance.
That's the result of failed leadership.
How long must we suffer this?
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I saw that and swallowed my gum. It’s no accident government immediately released a preposterous commercial declaring millions of vaccines for coronavirus, innovation everywhere, backing business and ‘tackling climate change’ in a single bound.
Looks like a win for the more neoliberal economy and health care system.
Ireland’s neoliberalism is exaggerated. It’s heavily constrained by proportional representation which does not permit the abandonment of entire communities. The software is open source, which is not a neoliberal idea. If UK wasn’t so keen on leveraging the app in ways that break the law it could have been just as agile. A clear case of the perfect being the enemy of the good as well as the usual overreach and control freakery of Cummings & Co.
There’s lots of good things about Eire, but when the popular vote seems thwarted by a mixture of the current incumbent , who has effectively been voted out, and the election system this needs looking at again then the whole system becomes suspect in the eye of the voter.
There is no reason why Sinn Fein cannot be more deeply and formally involved in my opinion – none at all – except that Varadkar wants the current set up to get all the credit. A truly proportional system would be different.
But well done Eire for cracking track and trace.
Richard please understand why.. the NHS tried to write their own app. No privatisation, see? Ireland hired an outside contractor who knew what they were doing. Privatisation, profit making companies gaining health care cash.
So?
Your pooint is?
World beating stupidity is what we are good at now.
Why?
Because those with the money who have got behind this Government are good at accruing wealth – looking after themselves – rather than backing policies that look after an entire country.
It seems the Ireland app was outsourced to a commercial developer whilst the NHS one was/is being developed by NHSX whose track record is not good. Maybe there are times when private involvement is needed.
Maybe that was deliberately done to undermine the NHS which as we know has been criminally (yes I said ‘criminally) underfunded since 2010?
I would not put it past this lot of charlatans passing itself off as a Government here in the UK.
Just to be clear, are you suggesting that NHSX (the digital development arm of the NHS) deliberately failed in developing the app to undermine the NHS?
Can’t help but be amazed by the paradox that Donald Trump gets tested daily for coronavirus but has tried unsuccessfully to block federal funding to states for testing and tracing because the coronavirus resurgence makes him look incompetent with a presidential election coming up in November. The Johnson government doesn’t even have this excuse with four and a half years to go before a general election!
Reuters article on Trump trying to block $25 million of federal testing and tracing money to states despite this money being approved by Congress:-
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-idUSKCN24K0IP
I decided I had not got time to cover that one today….
As a minor footnote to a flailing president Trump now says wearing masks is “patriotic”:-
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/trump-mocked-biden-for-mask-wearing-now-its-patriotic.html
Even though the horse has bolted because many UK voters appear to have an anti-expert bias for those who don’t the following article sheds some light on why the US and UK coronavirus pandemic response was poor:-
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/uk-coronavirus-pandemic-preparedness-what-went-wrong_uk_5f105b86c5b6d14c3363e8d2
The Huffington Post article leads to the Global Health Security Index (https://www.ghsindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2019-Global-Health-Security-Index.pdf), where I found the following paragraph:
“Knowing the risks, however, is not enough. Political will is needed to protect people from the consequences of epidemics, to take action to save lives, and to build a safer and more secure world.”
Which gets to nub of it. Need I say more?
No…
There was an FT article yesterday accepting the Scottish Government had handled the pandemic better than the British Government; but then proposed that this meant that its communications policy and execution were better, but on the ground there was little difference in the results. This is a staggeringly disingenuous conclusion to draw. There is no doubt that the purpose of Scottish Government policy is to eliminate COVID-19 altogether, or as close to elimination as can be achieved. The Scottish results, based on a cautious lockdown-release programme currently are producing a reasonable level of success. In Britian nobody even knows what is the British Government purpose; but from the avaialble evidence it certainly isn’t elimination.
The Scottish ‘Test and Protect’ programme is quite different from the British ‘Test and Trace’. At bottom the British system is a straightforward example of beoliberal ideology: privatise most of the the test and trace, and leave the rest to a centralised British public structure (PHE), in which the traditional local system has been dismantled by neoliberal austerity. Then bring in somebody from “business” to run it: Dido Harding. Scotland has kept its old-fashioned, local, public health, text-book, shoe-leather system of test and protect; and it works, is effective and responsive, and reflects the policy.
This is just one example of the difference. The Scottish Government did make a big mistake at the outset. Scotland is still part of the Union, and in an international pandemic the British Government took the lead (as it should), with a ‘lock-step’ policy. Stupidly the Scottish Government followed it, and it took weeks to realise that the British Government have no idea how to govern. Austerity had destroyed the framework for a coherent response; and the Conservatives returned to their fateful history (it has never changed in a crisis in three hundred years); they panic.
When the FT cannot even understand the story, it is time for Scotland to leave the Union.
Agreed
I think it is now time to add and stress “incompetent” as well as well as failed leadership.
Was talking to an Indian friend in Mumbai, a place I know quite well.
Asking him about COVID and especially the impact in slums like Dharavi – with a population of 1m or so, very tightly packed, we’d been thinking it must be terrible.
Turns out that they did have an outbreak and followed the standard lockdown, test, track, trace, quarantine approach successfully, and yes they have an app that they got going quickly. Result that it’s broadly under control.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/explained-how-mumbais-dharavi-flattened-the-covid-19-curve/articleshow/76910062.cms
India is a big place of course so COVID has a way to run yet, but when even the slums of India are being better managed than the U.K…
Astonishing…