Day: 18 May 2020

The Guardian leads this morning with the latest woes over the NHS's contact-tracing app. The message about there being a second version of the app may have got lost in the post on its way to the Ethics Advisory Board (see yesterday's daily update), but it made it to the Kent-based recruiters tasked with hiring 18,000 trackers and tracers. According to the Guardian, applicants have started to receive the following response: Thank you for your online application for this role. Unfortunately earlier today the roles were put on hold. This is due to a delay in the launch of the "Track and Trace’"app itself while the Government considers an alternative app. Assuming the alternative app is the one commissioned for £3.8m from Zulke based on the Apple-Google decentralised approach, this consequence was foreseeable. A centralised approach relies on an army of operators; a decentralised one doesn't. Does this mean the track-and-tracers hired in England so far will have to be furloughed? Scotland's Sunday Mail attacked the Scottish Government yesterday for not having hired a single tracer, but that may turn out to be prudent in retrospect. (A stopped clock, etc.) The latest news is that the roll out of the app is going to be delayed until June. The one straw Matt Hancock can clutch at is that the UK ...

by Guy de la Bédoyère “Let’s work the problem people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing.” So says Eugene Kranz, NASA’s Chief Flight Director in Mission Control in the motion picture Apollo 13, when confronted by the discovery that the spacecraft was crippled. What followed is attested as a remarkable example of co-operative team work that brought the crew safely home to Earth. They were confronted by a problem that had never been anticipated and they had only hours to start solving it. It has become clearer with every passing day that the response to the COVID-19 crisis was driven by guesswork from the start and, yes, that may well have made things worse. Government policy here and abroad has continued to be driven by guesswork. Some of it is informed guesswork, some less so, but it is guesswork just the same. That was even openly admitted by Professor Graham Medley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who oversees the mathematical modelling for SAGE. To be fair, there is a great deal of effort now being put into working the problem, but a great deal of that work is going to have to be applied to solving the new problems created by diving in based on guessing. Even the lockdown was a guess, and not founded ...

The coronavirus care-home scandal has been smouldering away in the media for some time, flaring now and then into a headline issue. During PMQs on May 13th, for instance, Sir Keir Starmer managed to bump the issue back up the agenda, skewering Boris with a quote from guidance issued very early on into the outbreak by Public Health England (PHE). According to Sir Keir, the guidance had advised that it was “unlikely that people receiving care in care homes will become infected”. Although it didn't seem particularly convincing at the time, Boris’s subsequent claim that Sir Keir had quoted from the guidance “selectively and misleadingly” turns out to have been fair – the quote in question was preceded by a note that the guidance was “intended for the current position in the UK where there is currently no transmission of COVID-19 in the community”. At the time of issuance this was true. Alas, the media had its story and the political damage had been done. (The guidance both politicians were referring to is here). What’s unarguable, though, is the grim seriousness of the situation within UK care homes. If the central aim of the UK Government's lockdown policy was to protect the most vulnerable, then it simply hasn't succeeded in the social care sector. As the Health Foundation has noted, ...