When the Covid 19 pandemic descended on the world, many countries developed a Track and Trace system to break the chain of infection in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. This was a universally accepted method to control the transmission rate and to save lives.
The UK was not far behind in accepting the science behind it, yet rather than base their contact tracing app on existing ones that were working perfectly well within the European Union, they elected to use their own body of experts to develop one from scratch that would be, to put in the words of the politicians, world-beating.
This saying was a mantra born from the ideological thinking that spawned Brexit, the UK’s breaking away from the European Union, and would prove to enable the abject failure behind England’s Track and Trace system that was to run horribly over a budget that was already exorbitantly inflated from the outset.
This epic failure was set in motion even before the pandemic descended on the UK, unfortunately, the country was already in turmoil from the results of the Brexit referendum in 2016. The fallout from that vote divided the country straight down the middle, with dire warnings of the consequences on one side, hopes, and dreams on the other.
Even the politicians within the governing Conservative party were not immune to the discord, many jockeying for power when the promised Brexit was not delivered by their leader at the time, Teresa May. A snap election heralded a change in leadership with the former mayor of London, Boris Johnson, taking the reins. As was his right, he placed his own close colleagues who had supported him into key ministerial positions and set about implementing his campaign manifestos.
The emergence of the pandemic derailed his plans somewhat. Accredited scientists in the field of virology and immunology were recruited, and an eye was cast wide to verify how the rest of the world was coping with this virus.
Monitoring who was infected and who they had become in contact with, seemed the universal form of controlling the spread of the virus, followed by testing and then isolation of the individuals for fourteen days. But which company to put in charge of implementing this vital system?
Under normal circumstances, and following governmental protocol, a tender would be put out and the most eligible company evaluated in regards to experience, pricing, and the ability to manage the task competently.
All of this was disregarded and the government awarded the contract to a private company, with no expertise in this area, called Serco. They were awarded a budget of £22 billion to create, run and monitor the new Track and Trace system and develop the app. It is important to note that the budget for the Track and Trace system in Germany at the time, a system that worked extremely well and was available for use by the UK, was around £50 million.
Oversight by the Department of Health & Social Care was virtually non-existent, as were the results that fell far short of expected projections from the company.
To make matters worse, the method of implementation was almost comical in this age of digitalization. Call centers were set up with inexperienced people employed with little to no training who were simply instructed to call people suspected of being in contact with a positively tested person to self-isolate. Even this notification was delayed by 24 hours, increasing the time of potential further infections.
Amazingly, Serco required a further £15 billion of public money to continue, increasing the total figure to £37 billion. When this became public knowledge there were accusations of corruption, and sheer incompetence on a governmental scale not seen before in the United Kingdom.
The utter failure, the debacle that was the Test and Trace system that was hailed as being world-beating was so ineffective, so utterly useless, that it proved to be anything but.