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1/ You know what we've not heard for a bit? The Test & Trace success percentages. Anyway, they are available weekly to Jan 6th https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nhs-test-and-trace-england-statistics-31-december-2020-to-6-january-2021 & I've had a look to see how it's going, with focus on test details given to the non-High Priority Teams e.g. Serco for tracing
2/ The tables are worth exploring in detail, but no.15 really stood out for me. Last week, 612,377 (83.7%) of the 731,733 people 'traced' as contacts were in the same household as the person who had tested positive.
3/ However, the note to the table confirms what I've said previously about what would happen after the quiet legal changes that came in on Sept 28th., Namely, Serco etc get to counts all these people as 'traced' even though they don't have direct contact.
4/ That is, they just get to assume that the person testing positive will get others in the household to self-isolate: reasonable in some case perhaps, but not others e.g. HMOs
5/ This leaves just 119, 356 people (16.3%) actually traced by the contact tracing firms from contact details provided. The key question is whether Serco etc are still getting paid the same for a job that arguably got 83% easier to do at the end of November, and if they're....
6/...using the funds accrued to up the quality of their conversations about contacts, given that a comparison between table 10 & 18 shows that last week 336,129 people testing positive produced 672,787 contacts to trace.
7/ That's pretty well exactly 2 people to trace for +ve case, most of whom are in the household. This seems low to me, even in semi-lockdown, given e.g. New South Wales experience of creating 10-25 contacts (and at least 1/2 hour doing each tracing call) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-18/contact-tracing-coronavirus-australia-five-hallmarks-succcess/12759068
8/ So some questions to be asked about how well Test & Trace is now doing, 6 weeks after the change in requirements. Something perhaps for Forensic Labour to look into a bit more than I've had time for. END
9/ ps. I covered the issues with the September legislation, which acted as another cost-cutting route to the Test & Trace firms, here https://bickerrecord.medium.com/self-isolation-and-the-law-41a72e765b2a
