Another major issue I don't feel gets enough coverage was and is the extent to which the test and trace is just not working as well as it needs to.
The premise of opening up the country was ostensibly that we had this, air quotes, "world beating" test and trace system which would mean only those who'd been exposed would need to isolate and everyone else could have something resembling normality. This is a system that seems to have worked well in places like South Korea.
Well, spoilers, we do not have a world beating test and trace system.
According to data from
https://covid.i-sense.org.uk/ it was reaching only 32% of contacts of infected peopled in late November, and even that miserable total was their best result, their
historical data goes as low as 13% in August and generally hovers around the 20% mark. For the majority of the pandemic you can only count on about 1 in 5 infected people having their contacts traced. According to Sage, the number needs to be more like 80%, 4/5.
If I'm reading the data right, the major bottle neck seems to be testing, they generally only seem to get a positive test for half to a third of infections. One cause of this is that you are actively discouraged from getting a test if you do not have symptoms. The thing explicitly tells you not to book a test unless you have symptoms, my boss said he lied to the thing over Christmas to get a test after he'd been in contact with someone who was infected but he didn't have symptoms. This goes back to the time they boasted about how many tests they had available, then the system got overwhelmed and ole Twat Hancock decided to blame people booking tests when they had no symptoms, seemingly forgetting or not caring that asymptomatic transmission is a thing.
Also the app requires bluetooth and a modern smart phone, so that's fucking stupid. I hope no one with a Xperia A4 or Moto XT1097 gets the Coronavirus, you dumb fucks!
So basically, they had this policy that was betting 10s of thousands of lives that they could do this one thing.
They could not do this one thing.
And once it became clear they could not do the thing, they continued to do the policy.