Do we wonder where the £37 billion on Test and Trace is spent?
On March 4th 2021, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee COVID-19: Test, track and trace (part 1) Forty-Seventh Report of Session 2019–21 Report, was published https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/4976/documents/49795/default/
Here are some quotations from it:
There is still no clear evidence to judge NHST&T’s overall effectiveness. It is unclear whether its specific contribution to reducing infection levels, as opposed to the other measures introduced to tackle the pandemic has justified its costs.
Professional bodies, such as SAGE and BMA, have raised concerns about the effectiveness of the programme in reducing transmission. NHST&T publishes weekly performance data, but these do not provide an overview of the speed of the process from beginning to end (“cough to contact”) and thus do not allow readers to understand the overall effectiveness of the programme.
The percentage of total laboratory testing capacity used in November and December has remained under 65%, at the lower end of what NHST&T states is best practice (between 60% and 85%). Even with spare capacity, NHST&T has never met the target to turn around all tests (in face-to-face settings) in 24 hours
At the beginning of November 2020, a ministerial announcement said there were 2,300 consultants and contractors working on NHST&T. When we took evidence in mid-January the Department estimated that from Deloitte alone there were still around 900 contractors on the books. In early February NHST&T said it was still employing around 2,500 consultants, at an estimated average daily rate of around £1,100, with the highest daily rate paid of £6,624. It is concerning that the DHSC is still paying such amounts—which it considers to be “very competitive rates”—to so many consultants.
There is now a widespread roll-out of rapid tests (primarily lateral flow device (LFD) tests, which give results in 30 minutes) for local authority use and in other community settings, such as schools and workplaces. To support this roll-out, the government allocated a further £7 billion to NHST&T in December 2020 on top of £3 billion already budgeted. The Department had already purchased 384 million LFD test kits. However, a number of reports have raised concerns about the effectiveness and risks of mass testing using LFD tests, given their lower accuracy compared to laboratory processed tests, particularly the higher risk of ‘false negatives’ (people who actually have the virus getting a negative result).
The Government is now accelerating the roll-out of vaccines across the country, but we have not seen a future strategy for test and trace in response
In September 2020, SAGE concluded that “test and trace was having only a marginal impact on transmission”…..NHST&T’s model [also] suggested that only around 10% of the total reduction in the “R number” could be attributed to NHST&T’s contact tracing activities. We are also aware that the interim report on the Liverpool mass testing pilot did not find clear evidence that the pilot reduced positive COVID-19 cases or hospital admissions.
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