Test and Trace Coronavirus App Failed to Log Restaurant and Pub Data
Friday March 5th at 3:35 p.m .: This story has been updated to reflect the news that test and trace spending will increase from £ 22bn to £ 37bn, with another £ 15bn in Rishi’s 2021 budget Sunak are provided.
An amazing leaked report on the government’s test and trace system and app shows that hundreds of millions of check-ins at restaurants, pubs and hairdressers have never been used to create a picture of the spread of COVID-19. The failure of the system, which at the time of writing cost £ 22 billion and is now over £ 37 billion, has put “thousands of people” at risk of unnecessary infection, according to Sky News.
The conclusions of the reports leave gaps not only in the government’s strategy for public health in the hospitality industry, but also in the industry’s long-standing belief that it becomes a scapegoat for having “no data” to show hospitality with the Associate transmission and / or infection. It is assumed that there is no data because the system did not provide it.
Jut last week after Prime Minister Boris Johnson, UK Hospitality, the main retail organization for restaurants and pubs, announced the reopening plan, he said: “[The PM] says the reopening plan is determined by data, but all of the data suggests hospitality is relatively safe and is only associated with a tiny number of cases […] Over the past year, the government has repeatedly miscalculated the risks associated with hospitality. ”
The £ 40 million contact tracing app launched in October was designed to alert guests and workers to the risk of infection from COVID-19. In the initial stages, it was believed that the extremely low number of venue alerts – only one in the first fourteen days – indicates that venues are not a place at risk of spreading the virus. This report, which says that “capacity problems at the local level” resulted in the alert system not being used, suggests that in reality people simply were simply not being informed of possible risks. Restaurants, pubs, bars and cafes are still legally obliged to display a QR code as in the picture above.
Anyway, you’d better do some filming. Here is the relevant side of the report so you can see where the information is coming from
As a reminder, if you work for Public Health England or Test and Trace, my DMs are always open. Get in touch and we can arrange secure communication. Pic.twitter.com/6PsAu296Qo
– Rowland Manthorpe (@rowlsmanthorpe) March 4, 2021
After UK Hospitality claimed that hospitality venues were largely “covid-safe” during the crisis, it said today that the report was “incredibly frustrating”. CEO Kate Nicholls said:
Our teams have worked very hard to collect this data, provided that it will be used if there is a problem. To hear that it hasn’t been used and that we actually had other limitations without really strong evidence that there was a hospitality issue is cause for concern.
Several hospitality leaders have used the argument “further limitations with no real clear evidence that there was a problem with hospitality”. Greater Manchester nightly economic advisor Sacha Lord is so excited about it that he questions the reopening of the “Roadmap” in the High Court based on it. However, the discovery that restaurant data was not used means that a lack of data did not result in minor cases. This means that a lack of data creates a vacuum for understanding the spread of the virus. Public Health England’s use of Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI) data to indicate minimal cases related to restaurants has been repeatedly debunked.
In addition, the systemic failures could result in restaurants and pubs being brought to justice for data protection violations. The lack of staff and / or systems management at Test and Trace resulted in confused health officials asking restaurants to contact customers directly if the task was to be done by the testers and tracers. Some restaurants felt they had no choice but to do so as the system did not provide any further instructions.
As the government sees a vaccine roll-out boom, Boris Johnson drafts a “cautious but irreversible roadmap,” and Rishi Sunak puts forward a budget supposedly intended to bring businesses to the promised land of summer, likely to do so contributed is a strong reminder of his pattern of mismanagement.
