I had to take my toddler for a COVID test earlier this week - it was a depressing and deeply infuriating insight into just how incompetent and *blatantly* corrupt the UK's out-sourced testing set-up is.

I booked a slot at a 'test centre' which turned out to be a tent in a leisure centre car park. When I entered I was handed a test & leaflet by a kid who looked 16 yrs old & then left to administer the test on my son alone in a small bay of the tent without even have a curtain.

There was no one medically qualified to help, answer questions or even just offer reassurance. The only advice available was in the leaflet given to me. I had to try & hold my son's hands & head at the same time & put a scarily long probe into his nose while he screamed in pain.

Several other parents who'd also arrived alone were similarly struggling & I could hear multiple other kids screaming & crying. The staff - who had clearly received absolutely minimal training - all just looked on passively either bored or vaguely apologetic. It was a mess.

While the govt is funnelling *billions* of public money to Deloitte (et al) under the guise of fighting COVID, the actual public health measures it's responsible for like this are being operated by barely trained teenagers. It was potentially dangerous & unnecessarily traumatic.

This method clearly leads to large numbers of false negative results too, as even doing the test on yourself is difficult, let alone on a child. Friends of mine in other countries who I told about this genuinely couldn't believe people here were being forced to do it themselves.