You would have thought that any basic lessons would already have been learned. Better testing and tracing for a start and not having an incompetent government running things.
Liverpool was mentioned at the hearing yesterday, it was something to do with us allegedly being treated differently from Manchester. Not sure. But Johnson's answer alluded to the efforts we'd made in the test & trace campaign, in fact we were one of the first cities that trialled it and it was lead by a London consultancy firm.
I was one of the operational leads to get the Covid Tests collected from the communities were we not getting sent via designated (priority) Post Boxes.
And you're right, despite our best efforts and having resourced it fully, it was a bit of a shambles. The wagon that was supposed to pick up off of the tests we'd collected during the day sometimes didn't turn up. So for example a person would develop symptoms during Monday, take a test Monday night, attend the location were the van was to hand the test over Tuesday morning, but the test wasn't collected to be taken to a central point until Wednesday 7pm because it didn't turn up on Tuesday 7pm. So the test would arrive to be processed at a central location on Thursday morning and fuck knows how long it took to to be looked at after that.
So imagine how many people contracted Covid between Monday morning and mid-day Thursday.
Of course it was a very, very difficult period, Covid was an enormous & serious event for us and we did actually do well to put so many good things in place. But certain projects failed and were costly. Fuck knows what the London Consultants were paid.
I won't even go in to the shite PPE we had delivered that never left the site, someone made big dosh off that.
