My view on this is that there’d be a lot less grief being handed out over Project Moonshot if the existing solutions were being given the same level of focus on making them work. The current plan from the UK government is equivalent to a software developer responding to a bug report by rewriting the whole application - it may well work, but it’ll be massively more expensive, and come with a whole host of new unknown problems.
Right now in the UK the basic testing infrastructure is a mess, people are being told to make 500 mile round trips to get tested, and then thousands of tests are being disposed of undone because of logistical issues.
Moonshot has a budget roughly equivalent to running the entirety of the NHS for a year, I can think of much better uses for that money than a project with no clear path to success, such as massively scaling up test and trace infrastructure. But of course we’re Great Britain, and so everything must be the very best. Such as the failed attempt to implement tracing apps with a custom solution rather than building on top of the Android and iOS SDKs for the purpose.
Right now in the UK the basic testing infrastructure is a mess, people are being told to make 500 mile round trips to get tested, and then thousands of tests are being disposed of undone because of logistical issues.
Moonshot has a budget roughly equivalent to running the entirety of the NHS for a year, I can think of much better uses for that money than a project with no clear path to success, such as massively scaling up test and trace infrastructure. But of course we’re Great Britain, and so everything must be the very best. Such as the failed attempt to implement tracing apps with a custom solution rather than building on top of the Android and iOS SDKs for the purpose.