UK government seeks test and trace executive for up to £2,000 a day

[Northerner]

The government is seeking a director of operations for its beleaguered test-and-trace system who can turn around “failing call centres” for a rate of up to £2,000 a day.

A job advert posted on recruitment sites stated that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) was looking for a temporary “VP of operations” with experience “in running call centres of 18,000”.

It comes as the prime minister, Boris Johnson, admitted that the £12bn coronavirus contact-tracing service needed to provide faster results and he shared “people’s frustrations” over turnaround times. Figures published on Thursday showed test and trace figures had hit a new low of less than 60% of close contacts being reached, while turnaround times had risen to nearly 48 hours.

UK government seeks test and trace executive for up to £2,000 a day

Health department has since taken advertisement down, saying it needs to be redrafted

www.theguardian.com

They can hardly deny it's not working, putting out an advert like this 🙄 15% of tests turned around in 24 hours, rather than the 100% promised. PM likes to say how many tests they are doing, but if they are not getting results in a timely manner you might as well not bother

 

[Eddy Edson]

Anybody who can quickly turn around a failing call center operation surely doesn't need any public health experience. Geebus ...

 

[Bruce Stephens]

PM likes to say how many tests they are doing, but if they are not getting results in a timely manner you might as well not bother

Seems much worse than that to me: testing and contacting people is only of value if they do something.

So that feels to me like the low hanging fruit: spend £1 billion (or whatever seems spendable) on supporting people to isolate when we think they ought to. Then we can get some value for these hundreds of thousands of daily tests.

 

[Eddy Edson]

Seems much worse than that to me: testing and contacting people is only of value if they do something.

So that feels to me like the low hanging fruit: spend £1 billion (or whatever seems spendable) on supporting people to isolate when we think they ought to. Then we can get some value for these hundreds of thousands of daily tests.

That, plus (unfortunately) some stick in addition to the carrot - ie fines. Plus clear simple consistent messaging, including clear simple achievable targets.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

That, plus (unfortunately) some stick in addition to the carrot - ie fines.

We have fines (up to £10,000), and we have some support but it's very weak. £500 for two weeks if you receive Universal Credit and when you manage to receive a positive test (so if you have a fever, cough, loss of taste and smell, and extreme fatigue, but your test is negative you get nothing). (I just checked and this payment (for people on UC) is for people asked by Test and Trace to isolate, so does include contacts of someone who tests positive.)

We could surely usefully spend more money (and not always money: just showing that we care by involving the large numbers of volunteers).

Offer accommodation to allow someone to stay away from family members, offer help in supporting people who the isolating person would otherwise be looking after, etc. (Would have been better to do this when our numbers were much smaller, and maybe we're stuck with general restrictions now as the most practical ways of reducing numbers.)

Plus clear simple consistent messaging, including clear simple achievable targets.

Yes. Not much chance of that, unfortunately.

 

[Docb]

That, plus (unfortunately) some stick in addition to the carrot - ie fines.

As @Bruce Stevens says, we have the fines. What we do not have is the mechanism for enforcing action and threats without follow up are pointless and counter productive.

 

[mikeyB]

Oh well, they still think that the more money you throw at it the better it will get. In Scotland they haven’t used any private company to do the test and trace, and kept it local. That was an offer made to the English government right back in March, but they preferrred spending billions on a world beating system using anyone who had donated money to the Conservative Party. Trouble with that is that they hadn’t got a single person with experience in public health. Only computer models. And no local knowledge. Wherever that local nous has been used - S Korea is a shining example- then and trace works perfectly.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

What we do not have is the mechanism for enforcing action and threats without follow up are pointless and counter productive.

I fear more sticks might appear.

But that's exactly the wrong place to spend the money. Instead, offer more carrots: make it easier for people to do what's wanted of them.

 

[Eddy Edson]

I fear more sticks might appear.

But that's exactly the wrong place to spend the money. Instead, offer more carrots: make it easier for people to do what's wanted of them.

I think that's absolutely the most important thing, but I think you also need some stick (with real enforcement).

This is just from the Victorian experience, but it's probably pretty general: seems like there were two main vectors (once bars/restaurants/public events shut down) - people working when they shouldn't and people moving between households. A large part of the first category was economics but some of it was people just being ignorant/stupid, which was the major part of the second category. Scary VicPolice handing out fines left right & centre seems to have been effective in stopping this, probably as a smaller effect than constant messaging, but an important effect nonetheless.

I do think Vic is an interesting model - not so great public health structures including creaky contact tracing, but really good at doing "lock downs" including carrot as well as stick. So after things got out of hand, pretty quickly reduced daily cases from about 700 (equiv to about 7,000 in the UK) to one or two.

Of course having closed borders is a huge thing. Also a pretty huge thing was having the rest of the country looking at the state like it had p*ssed in the pool, and helping it make its contact tracing operation better - more decentralised, more public health bods, fewer bureaucrats. And a federal government successfully pressured into firing up the printing press.

 

[Northerner]

Offer accommodation to allow someone to stay away from family members, offer help in supporting people who the isolating person would otherwise be looking after, etc. (Would have been better to do this when our numbers were much smaller, and maybe we're stuck with general restrictions now as the most practical ways of reducing numbers.)

This has been the practice in some other countries when infections/contacts were relatively low - shame it didn't happen here