COVID-19

These local authority track and tracers that are already set up? I've never heard of them before. What do they do outside of covid times?

The idea that local authorities have a pandemic- ready system just sat there and wouldn't need to engage outside contractors is surely pie in the sky.

 

That's because you're closed in tier 3 but open in tier 2 isn't it?

 

Why do you always go to the absolute extremes with everything and never read what is written? who said they could cope with a national pandemic?
They work to stop salmonella outbreaks, legionnaires outbreaks. They find a restaurant who has had complaints and they track individuals who may have been and eaten there to warn them.
It’s a common job and has been in place for a long time.
The point was if you invest further in that system, with around 3 billion or so, a quarter of what we have used so far, you would have a well trained team who would have local knowledge of hotspots etc to get on top of the virus in an outbreak area.
You seem to take the whole virus as starting in millions of people. It doesn’t. It starts small in out breaks and you need to break those chains as early as you can. Particularly when we were only finding 70 odd cases in 100.000 at first. They would have been ideal. Experts we already had and we chose not to use them.


It’s funny if you read they are now handing back two thirds of the contract tracing back to local authorities

 

Point is why wait until it goes out of control to get to a point of being in T3. Makes no sense.

 

I'm asking a question that I don't know the answer to that's all. If the council have got 2 old dears sitting in an office chasing up 15 cases of salmonella a year I wouldn't necessarily see that as the sort of infrastructure that you can instantly up skill and grow.

If it's a team of hundreds of highly trained operatives just sat around for 99 years out of a hundred waiting for their time to shine then I could see that. I'm just trying to see what the actual infrastructure is because I don't know, that really determines whether I think I should be concerned by it.

Oh and I know it starts small but I'm just not sure whether tracing a salmonella incident is quite the same. Trying to find everyone who ate the chicken in a certain restaurant on a certain day is probably a little different to dealing with a contagious disease which often has no symptoms and requires isolation.

 

That wasn't your point. Your point was bout why some get extra support and some don't but it's fine.

 

And this constant chopping and changing is effecting peoples mental health and jobs, how can many run a business like a gym when they could be asked to close at the drop of a hat, because thats what will happen if tier 2 moves to tier 3 and no doubt thats what will happen to many.

It is not ideal but a full enforced 2 week lockdown would break the chain, after all it's a two week quarantine you have to adhere to so this time scale isn't plucked out of thin air. The virus will still exist out the otherside but the number of cases will be reduced therefore it will be easier for the track and trace system to get on top of the situation. An already failing track and trace will not work when there are 14k new cases daily.

 

I completely agree with your first point but I just don't see a solution to it. The only stable soultion is the one we all don't want, permanent lockdown. If we're in and out of "circuit breakers" then it's still exactly the same.

It would break the chain to slow it down, I agree, but as soon as the 2 weeks stop it would grow again. Like I say the first 2 weeks of the March lockdown didn't seem to reduce the cases down to manageable levels, it took 2 months of lockdown to do that so I'm not sure. I know we were in a different situation back then in terms of visibility but on March 23rd England recorded 2,000 cases on the 7th April it recorded 4,500 and it wasn't until the 15th May before it got under 2,000 again.

Chris Whitty obviously sees the value in it so there's obviously something there but I just struggle with it. Like I say it will be interesting to see what the outcome is in Scotland, no doubt it will be better in the short term as it's more severe but how will they come out of it?

 

I completely agree, there needs to be a plan going forward otherwise it's as bad as what they are doing now. 80% furlough ends this month so this could already be factored in without addition resources.

 

I mean it’s never gonna be the amount to cover the scale at the minute but the point being is they have experts in this field already. They will deal with small scale outbreaks which happen all the time but they have local knowledge, they know what needs doing. They get boots on the ground quick and get to work finding people. That’s all contact tracing is except we decided to nationalise it and now are going back to local areas to ask for their help.
If originally we used these experts, whether there is 2 or 5, we invested the money into them, let them train new recruits and ring fence the money for the next 2 years to keep them I am sure we would have saved money and made a much larger dent in the control of this spread than we are doing now. Of course that’s opinion but there is no way our current system is even close to being successful

 

Does local knowledge matter though? I am just skeptical that it's as easily scalable both in terms of people and knowledge as is made out. I'm just not sure that the are true experts to the level we would need - especially when local authorities are cut to the bone in terms of expenses.

Probably would have saved money. You know my thoughts on T&T though, no system is ever going to get to a perfect place because too many slip through the net but I just can't see the difference between having a purely local authority system and a combination of the two. I just don't understand the benefits apart from that people don't like the government outsourcing but when you're trying to put a consistent system in place relying on every LA doing their own thing doesn't automatically strike me as a solution.

 

I have my Bradford Council e-mail update as I usually do following any changes.

I really enjoyed this part,

"When meeting people outside - for example, a private garden/outdoor public space you must not meet a group of more than six people" (Meeting people outdoors is safer than meeting indoors because fresh air provides better ventilation)

Who'd have thought eh,

Yet since July I have been told I can meet my parents in a pub but not in a garden.

 

Yeha I think that’s a change in this 3 tier system. You can now meet people outdoors again as long as we don’t go into the highest category?

 

We had two employees of Bradford Council take another Covid test the other afternoon, I would assume the council picked up there were two pensioners living here and one had underlying conditions.
I'd have hoped that situation could have been enlarged and tried at local level rather than give the job to the likes of Serco.

 

not sure how many of you saw but Bradford actually came out of the press conference very well yesterday. Chris Whitty above praising our leaders

 

As well as the public health people there are also Sexually Transmitted Disease track & trace teams. Contact tracing is a highly skilled job. It requires persuasive skills and a great deal of tact, to persuade reluctant people to spill the beans on their contacts.
Local Authorities have been saying since this started that they had the expertise to run track & trace for vivid. Obviously they would have needed a big increase in personnel and finance s. But they would have been the right people to train the new recruits and they certainly wouldn't have used a spreadsheet instead of a database.

 

This sums up the shambles pretty well:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/13/covid-mugger-back-boris-johnson-wrestling-second-wave-?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

 

Mate! I'm an Environmental Health Officer working for a Lancashire Local Authority. For the past 3 weeks, we've had contact tracing forced upon us in addition to the normal duties we're supposed to be doing. I've done 40 so far and each one takes, on average, 45 minutes. Most of them are what the private companies have been paid millions to carry out but have failed to do so. Now the Government is planning to put all the responsibility on to Local Authorities without providing additional resources! We live in a crazy country with a Government who don't know what they're doing.

 

So how many if them are there, in general, in a local authority like Bradford or Leeds, in normal times?

Genuinely never heard of it before. I would hope that people with experience in what was required were doing the training no matter what the situation is though.