According to official estimates, No 10’s Test and Trace system has had hardly any influence on preventing the spread of COVID.
The controversial £37 billion scheme has been massively criticised over the past year for being ineffective at breaking the chain of transmission.
New Government modelling found the programme, which critics have characterised as being the biggest ever abuse of taxpayer money, may have only cut cases by as little as six per cent.
It also estimates that people isolating prevented 1.2 million to 2 million secondary cases, with NHS Test and Trace effective for stopping 300,000 to 500,000 of those.
The estimate assumed people with COVID symptoms and their households would still have to isolate if testing wasn’t on offer, but health chiefs noted that without the offer of testing, millions of more people would have needlessly self-isolated when they weren’t infected because they wouldn’t have been able to prove they were negative through a swab.
According to official figures, Test and Trace identified about 900,000 positive cases in August.
It comes as Boris Johnson will warn that the pandemic is far from over as he unveiled his winter plan, indicating that another lockdown couldn’t be entirely ruled out.
A report published by NHS Test and Trace looked at what influence it had over the above if people with symptoms still isolated without any access to testing.
It did this by examining the transmission reduction from testing, tracing and isolating from the current scheme. This was then compared to an imaginary situation where testing wasn’t on offer and households were told to self-isolate if someone developed COVID symptoms.
A panel including Professor Lockdown Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, helped with the modelling.
The study, which looked at the period from last August to April, found that the Test and Trace scheme decreased transmission between 10 and 28 per cent.
But if people stayed at home when they suspected they had the virus anyhow, like they’re supposed to, the testing system only reduced transmission from six to 19 per cent.
However, the report claimed the T&T system was crucial in defeating the R rate, a measure of how fast the virus was circulating, and bringing it below one.
It told 11 million people to isolate during the study period.
But it wasn’t meant to stop COVID cases, it was meant to make the government donors and supporters a huge sum of money, and to be honest, opportunities like this are pretty sparse, so when they do come along, the establishment will always take advantage of them – it’s what they do.
We had the Nightingale hospitals, care home scandals, economic ruination, mental health problems, and now the additional National Insurance tax hike, and aside from financing the vaccine research, the government has got everything wrong in this pandemic, but don’t worry, they won’t be paying for it, you will!
And some people have got extremely rich over this, and continue to do so, and the people of the United Kingdom are getting screwed as usual, and perhaps there should be an audit of where this £37 billion went and on what.
Test and Trace turned into a financial feeding furore, and the government girdled like great white sharks, and it makes you question if they’re financing an even bigger boat.
With their extravagant spending, record National debt, higher taxes, nanny-state legislation, the threat of vaccine passports, a net-zero economy and liberty destroying the green agenda – does that sound like a Conservative government to any of you?
