Contact tracing app - binned

Certainly world-beating eh?

 

They aren't.

They "won" remember.

 

...

 

I'm sorry David, but there is absolutely no way of defending this. I was on a Zoom call with some ex-colleagues the other day and we were discussing this. To the question "has any of us ever experienced an IT application, with any complexity, that had been delivered on time (and/or within budget)", the answer was a resounding 'NO' from everyone. The current leaders of our country are either utterly naïve, plain stupid, or both. Utter shambles.

 

I love the fact that Hancock has now said that they have had to look to another app as Apple would not change their system. I am not sure why the govt thought Apple would change it for them and why go alone when there was already a successful app being used by countries who have handled the virus far better than we have. Absolutely shocking decision in the first instance to go it alone and cause further delay to beating the virus.

 

I'd argue they were a waste of money as they built them whilst knowing they didn't have any staff to fill it. If I built a factory tomorrow and hired no staff, it'd be a massive waste of money as it'd just sit there empty, doing nothing.

 

Furlough scheme, self employed support scheme. Both delivered on time by the UK civil service - no contractors, no profits.

 

I always felt they were only going to be huge morgues

 

Another thing that really grips me in all of this fiasco is the the govt cannot say when an app will be ready for use. Now I am no expert in IT, but surely the govt could approach another countries govt, say NZ, and say, hey, do you mind if we use your very successful app! Does it work like that, surely that’s possible?

 

IT solutions built from scratch?

 

They never had the staff for the Nightingale hospitals - despite signing lots of 2nd and 3rd year nurses on fixed term contracts until September then announcing they were no longer going to pay them after July.

 

I’m not an expert on what goes off in HMRC, but there’s no apparent Non Covid use for either of those applications.

 

The app we’ll end up with was ready for use when we decided to build our own.
The government said that the working one wasn’t good enough for them despite it working elsewhere.

Now there’s nothing wrong with aiming high; but all the experts were somewhat surprised by that decision.

 

Asked whether it had taken too long to identify flaws in the app, Matt Hancock replied: "no, quite the contrary".He said the government "backed both horses" in developing its own software, as well as the Google/Apple model, for the app. He said there are issues with both, but "parts of each" combined together can build a "stronger" system.

Apple refused to share its technology apparently.

 

It very much looks to me that the Government and Johnson in particular have gone down the same route as many UK Governments have gone in the past. They have the belief that we (the British) know best and we shouldn't take notice of what Johnny Foreigner is doing because whatever we come up with will be so much better. Basically it's a national superiority complex which unfortunately has little or no basis today - if it ever did.

 

He would say that though wouldn’t he David?

 

World bleating waffle like we always get from him.

 

He also called Marcus Rashford Daniel.

 

What more than Boris's Garden Bridge.

 

Anyone with any knowledge of IT knew the government's method was the worst option and was tried purely to pull location data from people. It should never have been attempted.

And Apple don't need to share the technology. It's built into the phones. that's how it works. Government hubris and "We are number 1" mentality costing lives yet again.