Track and trace must inspire confidence
BESTABLISHED 1855 oris Johnson’s efforts to get the country back to something approaching normality rely on one key ingredient: confidence. In order to encourage parents to send their children to school, and return to the office themselves, they need a basis for that confidence. This is supposed to be provided by a “worldbeating” track-and-trace system that will suppress localised spikes by alerting people to their proximity to an infected carrier. Personal contacts were to be augmented by an app that would receive an automatic message whenever someone who subsequently tested positive was close by. However, the NHS app that was trialled on the Isle of Wight was abandoned because it was not compatible with Apple iphones, a significant flaw that surely should have been spotted.
The Government was urged at the outset to adopt an off-the-peg, decentralised app from Apple and Google, as Germany, Ireland and several other European countries have done.
Baroness Harding, a businesswoman, was appointed to drive the project forward but said the app would be the “cherry on the cake”, no longer the cake itself. This inability to provide a “game changing” app in a country where 80 per cent of the population own smart phones is the latest chapter in a sorry saga of IT blunders in Whitehall.
Instead, the Government switched its efforts to recruiting an army of telephone tracers for a “comprehensive” national network. But health officials in some regions say the system is failing to reach 50 per cent of contacts, and parts of the UK have abandoned the central system and introduced their own, with better outcomes. Now the NHS has taken that on board and is decentralising the system through a greater use of dedicated teams of local contact tracers focusing on specific areas. This will involve visiting people at home, which is a better way of encouraging healthy people to self-isolate than a call centre.
Finding, testing, isolating and tracing the contacts of anybody who has Covid-19 is critical to combating the pandemic. It is essential to the task of restoring confidence to which everything else is linked. The consequences of failure will be calamitous. It is to be hoped this new initiative will finally deliver the “world-beating” system that has long been promised.