Number crunching

£12 billion on a woefully shambolic, utterly ineffective, track and trace system, when the one thing most of the scientific/medical community were agreed upon in March was that Track, Trace and Isolate was going to be key to stopping, or at least slowing, the spread of the virus.

£12 billion.

It's a tricky number to get your head round. Just another huge figure, lost among many other huge figures of government spending. So let's have a go...

£12 billion is more than the entire annual budget for England's GP services.

£12 billion is at least 50% more than the entire annual budget for the Ministry of Justice. 

£12 billion is the combined annual budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) (2018-19 figures).

So, it would seem that one could potentially do quite a lot with £12 billion. Which makes it all the more impressive that we* have managed to implement a system that only contacts at best 80% of those who test positive, and only reaches 60% of their contacts.

Just for fun, I wondered what else we could have done with those sums of money.

There are approximately 43 million people of working age (16-64) in this country. 

If we employed 1 in every 1000 people as contact tracers, on a full-time salary of £20,000 per annum, that would still only cost £860 million. But they'd need computers, phone-lines and internet connections, so let's give them a budget for equipment and services of another £3000 each, which would take us almost to a whole billion pounds. Employing 0.1% of the working population, and equipping them, is still less than 10% of the sum the government has spent**. Given our current rates are 23,000 positive tests per day, each of our 43,000 newly-employed contact tracers would average approximately one person with a positive test every two days. They could spend a lot of quality time supporting that covid-infected person, meticulously noting their movements, and following up their contacts.

Let's not forget the development of the "world-beating" Track and Trace App either though. I mean, it must be expensive to develop a new App mustn't it? Let's just pause and consider the most expensive computer games ever made. BioWare spent the equivalent of $227 million developing Star Wars: The Old Republic. Or £175 million. And, married as I am to a Bear in the computer games industry, I can assure you that big computer games are really quite complicated. But even assuming that developing a phone App that hardly works is as difficult as a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, it's still a drop in the £12 billion ocean.

So, even after employing 0.1% of the country as contact-tracers, and developing an App to rival the world's most expensive PC game, we've still got a little less than £11 billion left to spend on more lab technicians, or reagents, or test kits, or courier services, or databases, or statisticians, or doctors, or nurses, or support schemes that allow those isolating to be able to afford to do so. Maybe we could even try feeding some children, or providing enough IT provision that children can receive the level of remote teaching previously reserved only for those who could afford a private education.

But we haven't done any of those things. Makes you wonder where all the money has gone doesn't it?

* It genuinely sticks in my throat to use "we" in that sentence, as though most of that "we" have had anything to do with this obscene waste of taxpayer's money. The Tory government hold all responsibility for this. All of it. 

** Obviously this is a bit of a cheat, as I haven't included employers NI contributions or any of the administrative overheads of employing people, but it gives you an idea of the sums involved.