Did you actually read the article?
At no point did it claim that we could get to a situation like NZ or Vietnam. I think everyone realises there will be differences between different countries.
Why did it bring them up then?
It simply made the point that if you want to get to a point where society can function relatively normally you need a robust and efficient test and trace system, instead of worrying about letting people get their 2 weeks in the sun.
And yet that is what people worry about.
That our test and trace system is neither robust or efficient doesn't really need further explanation, but out of interest how fast are we testing people and what number are we failing to contact?
Latest figures I saw for tracing all contacts was 68.8%. That is not brilliant when you are trying to control a virus.
As for how fast test results come through:
• Turnaround times for pillar 2 (swab testing for the wide population) have become
longer for all in-person testing routes2 compared to the previous week. In the most
recent week, 60.8% of in-person tests results were received the next day after the
test was taken compared to 70.6% in the previous week. Turnaround times for
satellite/home tests have become notably shorter over the past 3 weeks.
Both these figures are from gov.uk website.
Everyone I know wants to get back to some kind of recognisable functioning society, but our government is failing us, particularly on test and trace.
The stupidity of it is, if they'd managed to get their collective arses into gear on test & trace, then all our other problems caused by the pandemic would have been so much easier to manage as shown by NZ and others.
I don't know what you are talking about. Our test and trace system is "world beating".
In all seriousness though, our test and trace system is broken for a lot of reasons and it may not even be fixable in the current political climate.
A fundamental problem here is that, when somebody makes a mistake, everybody wants to pillory them. That's not just the government but in the civil service and their contractors too. Thus, there is a culture of CYA which means that the people doing the work want to keep things secret and when mistakes are made, they want to cover them up. For example, the test and trace system was using Excel spreadsheets for data transfer, and old spreadsheets at that. Predictably they broke. We still don't know exactly what went wrong because people are trying to protect themselves and their jobs. Why wasn't the whole process completely open?
Another problem is the way our government's machinery works. Normally, when the government wants to spend some money, it takes weeks or months to make a decision and then months to actually get around to do anything. People assume that when Boris says "do this" it's going to happen, but he can't wave a magic wand. For example, to get shed loads of PPE through normal channels might take weeks or months of procurement. The NHS and government procurements department is not up to the task of getting millions of masks next week. If you need two million masks tomorrow to stop people from dying and your mate says he can supply them, there is a very strong temptation to take him up on his offer.
These are the reasons why you see government ministers giving contracts to their mates and why you see departments using Excel for safety critical applications. There's too much secrecy and too much blame culture for us to fix this properly.
It also doesn't help when people decide to ignore the rules as they did in some Northern towns and cities when the 10pm curfew for pubs came into effect. You may not agree with the rule, but gathering together in large crowds after the pubs shut isn't going to improve the situation.
