NHS Test and Trace, which has cost the taxpayer £38 billion, may have only prevented 6% of Covid infections, according to a new official report. MailOnline has more.
No 10’s Test and Trace system has had barely any impact on thwarting the spread of Covid, according to official estimates.
The controversial £37 billion scheme has been heavily criticised over the past year for being ineffective at breaking the chains of transmission.
New Government modelling found the programme – which critics have described as being the biggest ever waste of taxpayer money – may have only slashed cases by as little as six%.
It also estimates that people isolating prevented 1.2 million to two million secondary cases, with NHS Test and Trace responsible for stopping 300,000 to 500,000 of these.
The estimate assumed people with Covid symptoms and their households would still have isolated if testing wasn’t on offer.
But health chiefs noted that without the offer of testing, millions more people would have needlessly self-isolated when they weren’t infected because they wouldn’t have been able to prove they were negative through a swab.
Test and Trace identified around 900,000 positive cases in August, according to official figures.
It comes as Boris Johnson will today warn that the pandemic is “far from over” as he unveils his “winter plan”, admitting that another lockdown cannot be completely ruled out.
A report published by NHS Test and Trace looked at what impact it had over and above if people with symptoms still isolated without any access to testing.
It did this by analysing the transmission reduction from testing, tracing and isolating from the current scheme.
This was then compared to an imagined scenario where testing was not on offer and households were told to self-isolate if someone developed Covid symptoms.
A panel including ‘Professor Lockdown’ Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, helped with the modelling.
The study, which looked at the period from last August to April, found the Test and Trace scheme reduced transmission between 10 and 28%.
But if people stayed at home when they suspected they had the virus anyway, like they are supposed to, the testing system only reduced transmission from six to 19%.
Worth reading in full.
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And for the past three weeks, you cannot get a blood test to save your life. Reason, no blood vials, not one in the UK. Pathetic, irresponsible disgrace this government has become.
37 Billion to track and trace individuals, and no interest at all in tracking where the whole thing came from in the first palce, the Wuhan Lab.
How would anyone know? Stick a finger in a damp place, hold it up to the wind and ah that’ll do, 6% sounds good doesn’t it.
I’m pretty sure this can be solved with more test and trace.
Test and Trace and Hands and Face and Space. Loss of Smell and Taste.
I’m not sure. Will this lead to crab paste?
That means it’s working!
(The New Normal mantra)
“Boris warns the ‘pandemic’ is far from over”.
There never was a pandemic, “Boris”.
£37 billion in 1.5 years is quite a sum.
The total UK debt after WWII was £21 billion for 6 years, so say £5 billion for 1.5 years. Scale that to today’s value, we have £224 billion.
Trick & Treat is therefore about 1/6 of the WWII budget pro-rata. I hazard to think what would have happened in WW II if money was pissed against the wall at that rate.
Presumably all the soldiers would need to have stayed in for two weeks?
Surely you have take into account how very much richer we are now?
That £21 billion debt was about twice annual GDP (£10 billion).
£37 billion is less than 2% of our current GDP (£2000 billion approx).
Classic deflection; was it money “well spent” – is there a comparative analysis with WWII debt incurred to defeat the Axis threat?
Its ok though, Mr Johnson is going to charge all workers and businesses 12b through the national insurance hike to pay for this blasted system not one of us asked for.
We already live in a socialist nightmare of government control.
Imagine a good government with people not running the Globalist agenda and running policy for the good of its people?
£37b that could have gone to helathcare services to support healthy lifestyles, pre emptive health checks, better health facilties available to more people who need it and to get more wonderful nurses who do so much to help people through difficult times and should be paid so much more than they are.
Just imagine it…
Malcolm Kendrick said in his excellent book, when the word “may” is used in the summary of a study, you should ignore it, it is meaningless.
It worries me that it has taken someone so long to work out what was obvious to people who look at the big picture.
For starters – just look at the graphs of the various versions of the disease around the world – they go up for six to eight weeks – fast for about the last three and then drop – there might be a bit of squashing the sombrero but that is the pattern everywhere. So test and trace is a complete waste of space
How about doing something positive for a change and making a list of all the people who work for Mitie as ‘Covid marshalls’? Names and addresses here? Start making files on each and every one of them, with photos and evidence.
https://inews.co.uk/news/june-21-lockdown-easing-more-covid-marshals-signed-up-1036430
“The Home Office has hired outsourcing giant Mitie to carry out checks on people quarantining under the international travel system, in a six-month Government contract worth up to £90m.”
https://uk.indeed.com/cmp/Mitie/reviews?fcountry=GB&sort=rating_asc
https://www.bracknellnews.co.uk/news/national/uk-today/19316152.reported-police-returning-holiday/
It is an awful lot of money but it is false that to say that is has cost the taxpayer £38 billion. £37 billion was the budget up to April next year. The most recent report on actual expense I can find was this NAO report from June:
NHST&T reports it has spent £13.5 billion of its £22.2 billion budget in 2020-21, an underspend of £8.7 billion (39%).
That’s alright then 🙄
Ah yes, “good news, we did not waste as much money as expected”. Or “things only got half as bad as predicted”. (This style of cheerful reporting is nowadays very common in German media as well.)
I didn’t say anything about it being good news. I just wanted to point out the error in the Toby Young’s piece.
Let’s think…a track and trace system widely reported to have been “less effective than was planned and hoped” self reports that it only wasted 13.5bn rather than the budgeted 22.2bn.
Who audits these figures?
6% of what though? A unreliable test that picks up tiny dead fragments of a virus that’s never been isolated and seems to produce no symptoms in most people anyway yet can be miraculously controlled using arrows on the floor.
The Track and Trace drive has nothing to do with protecting us from a virus. It is the electronic groundwork for the coming Digital ID / Digital Banking totalitarian state. Which is why 37,000,000,000 pounds is considered money well spent. #crimeofthecentury
Surprised it’s as high as 6%
Taking everything else into consideration, if this doesn’t get you angry, nothing will “the biggest ever waste of taxpayer money”…
Summary of the Winter Covid Brief
Every government response to covid must be seen as a success.
As soon as one response is seen to have failed people will start asking questions about the others.
Worth a watch-
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/09/14/fncs-carlson-biden-irrational-vaccine-demands-about-power-it-is-dominance-and-submission/
Well worth the watch. And of course in some form or other, it is happening nearly everywhere. This is a genocidal war on the masses and we are all in the crosshairs, whether vaxxed or clean. Resistance is vital.
“This was then compared to an imagined scenario…”
Like absolutely everything else dreamed up over the last 18 months then?
“A panel including ‘Professor Lockdown’ Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, helped with the modelling.”
I’ll stop you right there thanks.
Imperial College feasts on gazillions of Gates’s money, but they never mention this rather salient point.
“A panel including ‘Professor Lockdown’ Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, helped with the modelling.”
Going on all past performances then the figure is probably closer to 0.6%.
Follow the money – someone somewhere is getting very rich by prolonging this nonsense.
And they will have government connections. Track and Trace is just another Covid earner for those in the fat boy’s club.
I am reliably informed that they have now sorted out the problems with track and trace. They got a new ball of string.
I would be very interested to see what the £37bn was spent on. As well as the report mentioned in the article, there’s a Public Accounts Committee report (which I haven’t had time to read) here: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/ It may provide some clues.
I just hope most of it went on paying people to man the phones. we’d have been paying them anyway and not the best use of time but better than sending the money to china
A friend of a friend was manning the phones, having been made redundant from her job in hospitality thanks to lockdowns. Most days she did very little.
China can print its own money, just like any other country.
Ah, that report, which concludes “for the £billions spent we need to see a top class legacy system”.
We don’t care that it was morally repugnant, we don’t care that it was damaging rather than helpful, we just care that we can amortise it over a long period.
Beancounters gotta count beans.
Can you imaging the debacle the introduction of vaccine passports will be. Yes ‘Will’. That’s the direction f travel and that’s the end goal.
Vaccine passports say £500 billion annually, not too much left for anything else, but think of the advantages!
The Govs` fav Dido “nice but dim” Harding nailed on for national honours !
Call me stupid but how can an App cost billions!?
Government work.
Oh it’s not just an App! Oh no – there’s the army of overpaid consultants and contractors designing IT solutions that do the same thing and then arguing over which should be rolled out, the Sercos and other 3rd parties that are being paid squillions to phone people several times a day and even go knocking on doors. Oh and there’s the civil service muppets who are being paid a nice wage with final salary pension, and for whom this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to them so they are quite happy for the crisis never to end.
That’s a very good question. I believe the turnover of my employer (a software developer) is around $3bn or so, annually, globally, for all of many, many products.
I’m fairly sure that it wouldn’t have taken our entire company, let alone 16 others just like it as well, to come up with Spy-n-Snitch.
A healthy profit margin.
Just another academic discussion, with no real info as to where all that money went. Why not grab Dido Harding and force her to show you her bank statements?
Meanwhile, the likes of Zahawi and Javid and Whitty are rounding up your kids for some serious jabbing. Hey, let’s discuss Trick and Trace, no, don’t look over there at the school nurses and needles, Trick and Trace is much more interesting. Even though we’ve been analysing and discussing it for a year…