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Why is the government& #39;s messaging on testing all over the place? [THREAD]
1 - The best way to limit human and economic costs of coronavirus is test-and-trace. The reason this wasn& #39;t adopted in UK was capacity constraints, but unwilling to admit this, the government made up bull about test-and-trace being unnecessary in a developed country.
2 - With test-and-trace impossible due to capacity, the government moved to "delay" phase. This means social distancing + increasing ICU capacity. Therefore testing only needed for healthcare workers and in-patients.
3 - However, there was a problem - COVID-19 spread faster than government predicted and cases more severe. Thus testing capacity overwhelmed even with plan to only test healthcare workers and in-patients. As of yesterday 2,000 of 500,000 frontline NHS workers have been tested.
4 - To distract from this problem - i.e. govt policy failing on its own terms - the government responded to questions about lack of testing, including for NHS workers, with answers about why Britain doesn& #39;t need test-and-trace. e.g. (h/t @alexwickham)
5 - This fell down on 2 levels. First, it& #39;s irrelevant to our failure to test NHS staff. Second, by this point the government& #39;s overriding strategy has come into question. It turns out people want test-and-trace!
6 - Because it is loathe to admit its strategy is failing on its own terms (e.g. we& #39;re not even testing enough NHS workers and in patients) and that the overall strategy unpopular (people want test-and-trace). The government have resorted to these vague, aspirational answers.
7 - What& #39;s vague about that answer? It doesn& #39;t make clear whether the aspiration is to produce enough tests to keep NHS capacity up (by testing staff and inpatients) or to actually suppress disease through test-and-trace (by testing huge proportion of population).
8 - So what& #39;s their plan? It& #39;s clear government don& #39;t intend to ever test-and-trace. The capacity is not there. They do want to test NHS staff and in-patients. Their failure to do this up to now is an enormous fuck-up. They& #39;re scrambling to increase capacity to this minimum level
9 - However, they won& #39;t admit they& #39;ve abandoned test-and-trace. Why? Because that implies they& #39;ve given up on the main way of ending lockdown (as was achieved in S Korea). They need lengthy lockdown to be seen as act of god, not result of political failures or choice.
10 - All this means we can expect weeks more evasion from government, and media need to try to force government to come clean. That means pointed questions about test-and-trace, and whether we have abandoned it.
11 - It also means refusing to let government evade questions about testing of NHS patients/staff, with bromides about philosophical differences between strategies. The relative strengths of different strategies irrelevant - the government is failing on own terms!
12 - We can summarise by saying that government will not admit 2 things: 1) In rejecting test-and trace they have chosen suboptimal strategy due to capacity constraints. 2) Even on our suboptimal path, government are failing on their own terms.
END - The job of the press should be to force those admissions. Only once we& #39;ve got those out of the way can the government be straight with the public.
Over to you @bbclaurak @Peston @BethRigby
Over to you @bbclaurak @Peston @BethRigby
