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Likes: I know but it's good fun for as long as I can be bothered. If you you like his posts or not SSG has revealed the effectiveness of a covid app.Originally Posted by Phil B.
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I know but it's good fun for as long as I can be bothered. If you you like his posts or not SSG has revealed the effectiveness of a covid app.
When you think you have made a procedure idiot proof your company employs a better idiot.
i don't trust ANY app. it takes a fool to trust one.
HILARIOUS
The 3 or 4 Stooges or is it Amigos?
Boys and girls...and Canadians, I hate to break it to you but contract tracing doesn't work. Those phone apps don't work neither.
England's contact-tracing saga is at the heart of the government's failures
The saga of the attempts to set up an English test-and-trace system is perhaps the central story of the government’s Covid-19 failure.
At the heart of the tale is a prime minister who promised NHS test and trace would be a “world beating” operation. Next to him sits Matt Hancock, the health secretary whose record is now indelibly associated with the smartphone app that was meant to be integral to controlling the virus, but has yet to materialise. Other key actors include Serco, the multinational outsourcing company that has previously been contracted to run everything from prisons to air traffic control – and, at a cost of £108m, was recently put in charge of recruiting and training thousands of call centre workers to establish contact with infected people and ensure that anyone they had been close to went into self-isolation.
NHS test and trace to cut 6,000 jobs but strengthen regional teams
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Over the five months since lockdown began, one other set of voices has been central to the drama: local authorities, whose 140-odd directors of public health are expert in disease control and contact tracing, and whose councillors, officials and staff are forensically familiar with the areas they serve, even after a decade of crushing austerity. During the outbreak’s initial phase – roughly, from February to the end of May – many of these people complained of being cut out of decision-making about the pandemic, and deprived of resources and the all-important data that would allow them to get on top of local outbreaks.
ccording to Sir Chris Ham, a lifelong NHS insider and the former chief executive of the health charity the Kings Fund, the basic insight either ignored or misunderstood by the government was plain. “Contact tracing has to be led locally by people who work in the communities that are affected and understand them,” he says.
“They’re part-detectives, part-anthropologists: they work with leaders in faith groups, in community organisations, and public services, to understand why there are more cases in a particular area, and how to work with everyone to contain and reduce the challenges. You can’t do that sitting in a remote call centre.”
But now, with the reopening of schools in England less than a month away, everything is to change. From 24 August, nationally-recruited call-centre staff will be “ringfenced” into individual teams that will be linked to specific councils, and the national test-and-trace effort will take a new “integrated” and “localised” approach. This shift follows the arrival of local measures aimed at controlling Covid-19 flare-ups in Leicester and Greater Manchester – and the trailblazing creation of dedicated local test-and-trace operations in Blackburn, Lancashire, Calderdale in West Yorkshire, and Liverpool.
Last week, figures were published showing that whereas call-centre or online workers managed to trace 56% of people’s contacts, the figure was 98% among local health protection teams. The imbalance between the two approaches was perhaps most clearly demonstrated by stories of call-centre workers making handfuls of calls per month, while council staff were worked off their feet.
For those of us who have been following this story, disentangling the confounding mess that was hastily built to administer testing and tracing has been an onerous task. If the tale has a single point of origin, it was the abandonment of initial efforts on 12 March, and the outbreak therefore being allowed to slip free of any meaningful monitoring or official control. When the government then resolved to begin mass testing, its network of regional testing centres was outsourced to yet another private company, Deloitte.
Serco was joined at the heart of the national contact-tracing system by the US “customer services” giant Sitel. Local directors of public health, meanwhile, complained that they were unsure of their relationship with these players, and had woefully insufficient access to detailed data which – in theory at least – was being harvested by the government’s testing machine: information showing people’s age, address, and ethnic origin, all vital to local control of the pandemic.
Q&AWhat is contact tracing?
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Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said that people on the ground had ended up being “like local detectives being asked to solve crimes without being given the names of any of the victims or suspects.” Even when Leicester became the first area of the UK to impose a local lockdown, the city council initially bemoaned its lack of access to crucial infection data.
Belatedly, however, the basic orientation of the test-and-trace system had begun to change. In mid-May, NHS test and trace had announced the recruitment as a “national lead on tracing” of Tom Riordan, a highly-respected figure in local government, seconded from his job as the chief executive of Leeds City council. Insiders say that as he worked with Dido Harding, the Tory peer and former CEO of the mobile phone company TalkTalk who is now the executive chair of the test-and-trace operation, its workings at least began to tilt in a more localised direction. Insiders now talk about a “reverse takeover”, whereby the very councils that were initially cut out of the national test-and-trace system have been belatedly pushed to its forefront.
Nonetheless, change has taken months to materialise. On 1 July, it was announced that councils were to be offered the postcode-level infection data that they had been frantically requesting for months. Two weeks later, the government said that councils would be granted powers to close sites and premises hit by coronavirus outbreaks – and on 6 August, their access to information about local Covid-19 levels was enhanced to “near real-time data”.
If these things suggest palpable improvement, big questions remain. Concerns continue to be expressed about the numbers of test-and-trace workers councils are able to call on. Even if the national test-and-trace operation is now set to shed 6,000 workers, what will the continuing role of outsourcing companies be, and how much will it cost?
There is also a low rumble of concern about base politics. With signs of a second wave and the looming arrival of autumn, councils’ expertise will be essential for any meaningful control of the virus. But if England’s woeful experience of Covid-19 takes another turn for the worse, putting them at the core of how the disease is dealt with may also allow Boris Johnson and his colleagues to slip free of blame – something that must have at least flitted across the collective mind of this most calculating of governments.
President Trump's chief COVID-19 advisor, Dr Scott Atlas has resigned,
Dr. Scott Atlas resigns from Trump administration - CNNPolitics
Dr. Scott Atlas, a highly controversial member of the White House's coronavirus task force, has resigned from his post in the Trump administration, according to a person who works with the task force.
A source familiar with what happened told CNN that Atlas turned in his resignation letter to President Donald Trump on Monday. As a special government employee, Atlas had a 130-day window in which he could serve and that window was technically going to close this week.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Another source close to the task force told CNN on Monday that Atlas' departure comes as welcome news, as his discredited theories will no longer have a seat at the table.
Atlas' months-long stint in the White House was marked by controversy as he became a close adviser to Trump on the pandemic, adopting public stances on the virus much closer to the President's -- including decrying the idea that schools cannot reopen this fall as "hysteria" and pushing for the resumption of college sports.
In one extraordinary episode in October, Twitter removed a tweet from Atlas that sought to undermine the importance of face masks because it was in violation of the platform's Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy, according to a spokesman for the company.
Atlas was not on a call Vice President Mike Pence held on Monday with state leaders, according to a list of participants. During the call, Pence and members of the task force focused on vaccine safety and distribution as Covid-19 cases skyrocket across the country, according to his office.
Will Thanksgiving Be a COVID-19 Disaster? In Canada, the Answer Was 'Yes'
Will this year’s Thanksgiving gatherings lead to more viral spread in the U.S.? For a decent prediction, we need only look to our friends to the north, as Canada celebrated its version of Thanksgiving almost exactly a month ago, on Oct. 12. While Canada was already on an upward trajectory for COVID-19 even before Thanksgiving, several Canadian experts told me that, yes, the holiday almost definitely made things even worse.
“It’s not that we were flat and all of a sudden Thanksgiving happened and there we see an increase,” says Dr. Laura Rosella, associate professor and epidemiologist at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. But, she adds, “the reason why we’re fairly confident Thanksgiving did increase cases is that we saw our highest numbers yet in the two weeks following Thanksgiving, which is consistent with the incubation period, when people would show symptoms and get reported.”
Furthermore, Rosella says Canada’s post-Thanksgiving increases are coming even as it’s getting harder for some Canadians to get tested; more cases with less testing suggests truly explosive growth. “Because our testing was getting strained, the requirements for getting a test actually became stricter,” she says. “So we’re seeing more cases even though we had to change the criteria for testing such that only those who are in high-risk situations and are symptomatic are getting tested.”
Rosella also added that contact tracing efforts showed that Thanksgiving gatherings directly resulted in viral spread—useful and informative information that wouldn’t show up in the overall numbers above, but underscore the importance of an effective testing and tracing program.[/COLOR]
]Dr. Matthew Oughton, assistant professor of medicine at McGill University and attending physician in the infectious diseases division of Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, adds that Thanksgiving’s impact might have shown up even more prominently in the data, if not for some Canadian provinces’ decision to implement new measures, like shutting down indoor dining and movie theaters, around the same time as the holiday.
We just had our worst weekend, here in BC, with over 2000 new cases of covid from Friday to Monday.
Just because you do not like the facts does not mean that they are screwed up. It is you who is screwed up.Way to screw up the facts Senseless.
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