The government now intends to launch an app in the autumn, however it says the product may not involve contact tracing at that point.
Instead the software may be limited to enabling users to report their symptoms and order a test.
Baroness Dido Harding - who heads up the wider Test and Trace programme - will only give the green light to actually deploying the Apple-Google technology if she decides it has been made fit for purpose, which is not the case at present. It is possible this may never happen.
Ah, she’s found out and put her foot down (she’s in charge, y’know) … :roll:
So we’re back to maybe an app, and one that doesn’t do the job - it’s not just a shambles, it’s chaos … :!:
Who,s the technical geek responsible for foisting this DIY system
on the taxpayers?
Surely he/she should be fired for incompetence etc?
ls there going to be an inquiry at least?
Donkeyman!
Coronavirus: What went wrong with the UK’s contact tracing app?
There is scant proof from anywhere around the world that smartphone apps using Bluetooth are an effective method of contact tracing. Back in March, it seemed that the hugely powerful devices most of us carry with us might help us emerge from this health crisis. Now it looks as though a human being on the end of a phone is a far better option
As usual governments never seems to be able to get anything to do with developing software right, look at those computer systems that have proved useless in the past!
Giving evidence to the House of Lords science committee on Monday Baroness Dido Harding, who is leading the government’s test and trace service, said she could not give a date for when the app might be ready.
Asked how she monitored whether people were isolating and not spreading the virus, Baroness Harding admitted she did not have data on compliance and added that trust was key.
Clueless, as usual …
IMO, she gets successive sinecures because she’s the granddaughter of Field Marshal John Harding, 1st Baron Harding of Petherton, who commanded the Desert Rats in World War II, and therefore “owed” a living … :shock:
Coronavirus: Northern Ireland contact tracing app to launch next week
BBC News NI
A coronavirus contact tracing app for Northern Ireland will be launched next week, the health committee has been told. Dan West from the Department of Health said the release of Stop Covid NI was supported by the executive. The app will supplement the phone-based contact tracing programme already in place.
Northern Ireland will be the first part of the UK to have a contact tracing app. The Republic of Ireland’s app launched earlier in July. Both apps have been designed by the company Nearform.
Mr West, a chief digital information officer at the Department of Health, said the NI app would notify close contacts automatically. It would also identify people at risk of infection who would be impossible to trace through the traditional method.
The UK government is working on an app using the Google Apple toolkit
Mr West said the development and operation of the app in Northern Ireland “is orders of magnitude cheaper than the efforts in England to develop their app so far”. He said it would cost less than £1m to build and operate.
The UK government is working on developing an app for use in the rest of the country. In England an NHS team spent four months and nearly £12m developing an app which was trialled on the Isle of Wight but did not work as planned. Health Secretary Matt Hancock then announced the new focus would be on a decentralised app using the Google Apple toolkit - but that was unlikely to be ready for months.
I’ve no idea how effective the Northern Ireland solution will be but the fact that the whole of Ireland will be covered, in the immediate future, for a couple of million pounds is astounding … :!:
Meanwhile Dido “Incompetent” Harding has no idea when the multi-million pound English app will be ready, if ever …
Coronavirus: Scotland developing its own contact-tracing app
31 July 2020
Scotland hopes to have the app ready for use in the autumn.
On Thursday, Northern Ireland became the first part of the UK to deploy a contact-tracing app.
Scotland is adapting the Republic of Ireland app, which uses the Apple-Google framework, it will also be compatible with the apps used Northern Ireland and Gibraltar.
Scotland’s Health Secretary Jeane Freeman said existing manual contact tracing would continue to be used alongside the app.
Wales’ Health Minister Vaughan Gething has revealed that officials are in talks with health officials in Northern Ireland over the acquisition of the new contact-tracing app.
That leaves England lagging behind the rest of the UK and Europe …
Coronavirus: Government to reduce Contact Tracers by 6,000 in England
The remaining contact tracers will work alongside local public health teams to reach more infected people and their contacts in communities.
This follows demands for more data and information from local health chiefs.
The approach has already been used in coronavirus hotspots in Blackburn with Darwen, Luton and Leicester.
The national service will shrink from 18,000 contact tracers to 12,000 with the remaining non-NHS call handlers redeployed as part of dedicated local test and trace teams, the Department of Health says.
Another fiasco overseen by Dido Harding is overtaken by events and sensible solutions.
Several councils, including Cumbria and Caldervale, have pre-empted the government’s volte-face by setting up their own test and trace systems while the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has said “This NHS test-and-trace system currently is not good enough to go into a winter with no treatment or vaccine” and he repeated calls for government to listen more to regional authorities, urging ministers to give councils extra funds to do more contact tracing locally, including for “people who can knock on doors and do a better job than this national call centre system”.
I thought this contact tracer was a phone app, and therefore, once developed, available to millions. Of course most people don’t like the idea of being traced so shrug it off.
But I may be mistaken, it seems.
Analysing and dealing with the virus on a regional level, sounds an excellent idea.
my nephews girlfriend has been working on test and trace working from home for about 8 weeks now and she hasn’t taken or made a single call! She gets paid £10 an hour for doing absolutely nothing
My daughter discovered over the weekend that the mother of someone in her social/support bubble was hospitalised and tested positive for coronavirus (she has some kind of underlying condition which makes it difficult to breath at times anyway). My daughter, who had had contact with her friend recently, duly called her place of work (a food retail outlet) to explain that she was going to have to go for a test, which she did. She discovered this morning that she was tested positive, and so is in isolation, along with my wife and myself. No obvious symptoms from any of us yet, and hopefully this will continue to be the case.
The relevance of all this for this thread is that my wife and I were sent text and email messages alerting us of the need to isolate, and to fill in a short questionnaire (DOB, ethnicity, postcode/house number, plus whether we had any symptoms). They had got our contact details from our daughter when she herself filled in some kind of questionnaire.
Is this what they mean by contact tracer? I though the idea was that an app could use GPS to alert people to possible other people who were virus positive.
I was told by a friend over the weekend that Ireland appear to have a successful app up and running, but that the UK government was refusing to buy it. I was also told that the system that the UK gov’t was trying to implement uses Apple maps, which is incompatible with the software that is being developed since it is a closed system (whatever that means). Perhaps the more tech savvy on here can elucidate on this matter.
England’s Flawed Virus Contact Tracing Will Be Revamped
England will overhaul its faltering coronavirus contact-tracing system, the government said on Monday, shifting some control from private contractors to local public health teams and cutting the jobs of thousands of call center workers who had complained of having no one to call.
What a staggering waste of money … and to reimburse a company that had been previously fined for fraud beggars belief …:shock:
“N.H.S. Test and Trace is one of the largest contact tracing and testing systems anywhere in the world, and was built rapidly, drawing on the U.K.’s existing health protection networks, to stop the spread of coronavirus,” Dido Harding, the executive chair of the program, said in a statement on Monday. “We have always been clear that N.H.S. Test and Trace must be local by default and that we do not operate alone.”
She would say that, wouldn’t she … even though it’s an outright lie … :!:
Good to hear that a third of the centralised contact tracers are being scrapped, they should get rid of all of them now and give the money to localised environmental health authorities so that they can train up more people before the winter.
Centralised contact tracing was never going to work very well, this kind of thing needs local knowledge. I will give an example,local people including community police know which areas and housing estates frequent certain pubs and clubs etcetera and can share that knowledge with EHA local health departments .
