Consultants bag £375m for their role in developing the UK's faltering COVID-19 Test and Trace system As UK school closures force working parents to juggle unfathomable phonics charts with their day jobs, it's time to turn our attention to those who accrue massive financial gain from the pandemic: consultants. In a Parliamentary written answer earlier this week, Helen Whately, Minister of State for Social Care at the …
If you don't get a Covid contract you could always try a HMRC one. Apparently CHIEF has just died today for imports and exports.
> If you don't get a Covid contract you could always try a HMRC one. Apparently CHIEF has just died today for imports and exports.
And the link you post as 'evidence' of CHIEF being down is a tweet from a woman who openly describes herself as an astrologer and even hedges her own tweet by saying "Apparently CHIEF isn't working..." ?
Could you not find something more, erm... official?
Boss of a freight business said this yesterday:
Honestly, everyone I’ve spoken to today doing European is stressed to the max. Things don’t work and people simply are getting lost. And this is a quiet week. No fun. Will get worse.
"failures in the interface to the French Customs System"
Please also read this whole thread. It's a clusterfuck.
> I'm ready and available to make a complete and utter shambles of any large contract the Government might award me.
But do you have the connections required? The difficulty is to be chosen, and only those having the right connections are eligible. (Which is why you often see the same names over and over again.)
Network and connections, that's what makes the world go round.
As UK school closures force working parents to juggle unfathomable phonics charts with their day jobs, it's time to turn our attention to those who accrue massive financial gain from the pandemic: consultants.
Actually, there are a fair few war-profiteers in this 'war' against Covid. I'll mention a couple, first I have to get this off my chest. Gavin Williamson has the voice and intellect of a three year old girl torturing her goldfish. You are not mature enough to care for a dog, Gavin, have a spider. You are not safe with the MoD, here, have Education.
Schools in Scotland have been paying £995 for a monthly 'treatment/ deep-cleansing' "electrostatically cleaned" that is utter theatrical hygienics. It's an airborne disease, you don't catch it from surfaces. Open the windows.
My cousin who works for NHS Fife complained that their doctors are getting paid a small bonus for each vaccination. Which is nice, except it's the nurses not the doctors giving the vaccine and they don't get paid squat.
>My cousin who works for NHS Fife complained that their doctors are getting paid a small bonus for each vaccination. Which is nice, except it's the nurses not the doctors giving the vaccine and they don't get paid squat.
GPs get paid per-procedure for all procedures they carry out - that's how the system works. The £10-per-jab bonus for jabs done before the end of the month is to ensure GPs have enough incentive to change their operations to ensure they can meet the demand we're about to put on them. For example this might include hiring an additional practice nurse to perform vaccinations. It isn't going straight into their pockets.
nurses should be getting the same.
Why? Their job is looking after the sick, for which they get paid. Maybe not enough, which is a separate issue, but there's no reason that they should get a bonus for doing the job they were hired for. Overtime, perhaps, if they're working more hours than usual.
Well similarly soldiers are hired to fight, so why pay them a bonus when they are putting their lives at risk?
The logic is clear, to me at least. Same rules apply. The morality and pragmatism should be clearer still - who is going to care for you when nurses are off sick or deceased? Maybe try clapping for a nurse?
There are billions being paid to friends of Tories for dubious contracts as highlighted here, that should be going to the frontline.
Well similarly soldiers are hired to fight, so why pay them a bonus when they are putting their lives at risk?
True enough. Recruiting posters notwithstanding, anyone who joins the army to "see the world" is a fool, soldiers are there to shoot people and get shot at, and there's no reason that I can see why they should be paid more when that happens.
I suppose it's better PR to add "combat pay" (or "operational allowance" as the UK calls it) rather than reduce their wages for "hanging about with nothing to do" in peacetime.
The morality and pragmatism should be clearer still - who is going to care for you when nurses are off sick or deceased?
You seem to assume that they only do it for the money, which I doubt. It's a vocation, they do it because they want to and the risk of getting sick is just part of the job. It could happen any time, not just when there's a pandemic.
There are billions being paid to friends of Tories for dubious contracts
Don't play silly party political games, you cheapen your argument.
Soldiers are paid to be ready and willing to fight. That's what they do most of the time. Actually going into action abroad is extra.
That's the way it's always been, except that in medieval times only the nobility (officers) would have got any bonuses. Now at least it's shared a bit more evenly.
The sheer volume of people who think that GPs "work for the lovely NHS" is farcical.
The majority are private GP-owned business that have contracts with the NHS to perform NHS works, they are outsourced and usually rack up significant mortgages and debt to build their practice.
It is one of the reasons why I am hoping a cheaper "videocall" option starts to proliferate within the NHS, as it allows national specialists to consult literally from their homes, at fractions of the cost of large central premises for basic information about 80% of medical queries.
>The point I was trying to make was nurses should be getting a 'war-time' bonus.
I don't disagree, and you'll likely find many of the nurses on the "front line" acting as vaccinators are doing so in addition to their day job and are likely being paid a premium rate as a consequence.
"GPs get paid per-procedure for all procedures they carry out"
Just to further clear up this point - there is an important difference between a GP as in a person and a GP as in the business of a GP practice. GPs get paid per procedure, yes, but it's the business that is paid, it's not some cash slipped directly into a specific doctor's pocket. So complaining that nurses should get paid instead of GPs is just nonsense, neither nurses or doctors are getting any extra pay here, it's the practice that employs them both that gets the money. What actually happens to that money will be up to the management of the practice and the contracts of their employees. It's entirely possible that unscrupulous partners in some practices will pocket all the money for themselves, but it's also possible that nurses will get most of it since they'll be the ones actually doing the extra work and needing overtime payments.
"It's an airborne disease, you don't catch it from surfaces"
*Bzzt* Incorrect. Primary transmission vector is indeed airborne particulates*. Secondary transmission vector is via hard surfaces (touch contraminated surface, pick nose type thing).
* insert obvious joke about opening windows in Scotland in winter here ... ;)
No offence, but you are wrong and mixing up different things.
Exaggerated risk of transmission of COVID-19 by fomites
Low risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by fomites in real-life conditions
You don't need to wash surfaces/packages etc. It's even safe to pick yer nose if you thoroughly wash your finger before.
Disclaimer: This research was before the new variants, maybe be precautionary.
> you don't catch it from surfaces
It took just a few seconds to find the CDC and WHO disagree with you. It's not the main transmission but is one of the ways.
CDC[1]: Droplets can also land on surfaces and objects and be transferred by touch. A person may get COVID-19 by touching the surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or eyes. Spread from touching surfaces is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.
WHO[2]: Hands touch many surfaces and can pick up viruses. Once contaminated, hands can transfer the virus to your eyes, nose or mouth. From there, the virus can enter your body and infect you.[...] Clean and disinfect surfaces frequently especially those which are regularly touched, such as door handles, faucets and phone screens.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html#Spread
[2] https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public
Hiya Graham,
I'm not going to say you are appealing to authority, just that my sources are far more credible than yours. Mine are peer reviewed scientists. Yours are the CDC and the WHO - and I don't rate them at all.
The CDC has been eviscerated by four years of Trump. It has failed it's nation on Covid.
WHO has failed the world on Covid. They refused to even call it a pandemic until mid March - and still haven't investigated the source.
The links you provided in the other thread are NOT peer reviewed. They are opinion. See the "comment" and "correspondence" labels at the top. Perhaps the authors have had other stuff peer reviewed. You are attempting to give greater credibility to those opinions than they deserve.
Let's go back to the reason we are talking. You said "you don't catch it from surfaces". Your first Lancet link says "In my opinion, the chance of transmission through inanimate surfaces is very small, and only in instances where an infected person coughs or sneezes on the surface, and someone else touches that surface soon after the cough or sneeze (within 1–2 h)."
Right there, even your own source says you are wrong!
You are spreading misinformation. Stop it.
Exactly how much experience do you have in the commercial cleaning business? How much time do you spend in schools?
995 bottles is a lot of bleach, yes, but bleach is not even remotely suitable for most of the surfaces in that environment.
And even if it were, you'd still have to pay someone to spray and wipe it on everything.
"Exactly how much experience do you have in the commercial cleaning business? "
I haven't had a bath in two months. My mates a head teacher though who is appalled at the waste of money that schools here are wasting on this monthly snake oil treatment.
If you research it, like I have, then you'll find it is bogus. It's shysters exploiting the panic over covid in schools.
"And even if it were, you'd still have to pay someone to spray and wipe it on everything."
Aye. They are called cleaners, and each school has always employed them. They still employ them even as these shysters move in. It's a scam, an obvious scam.
> Schools in Scotland have been paying £995 for a monthly 'treatment/ deep-cleansing' "electrostatically cleaned" that is utter theatrical hygienics. It's an airborne disease, you don't catch it from surfaces. Open the windows.
It can be contracted from surfaces.
Do you remember the "patient 31" episode in South Korea back at the beginning of the outbreak, when an infected woman went to a service at the Shincheonji church and subsequently infected dozens of people (the first 'superspreader' event)? Well, one of those infected wasn't even present at the same service: they were simply unfortunate enough to have sat in the same seat for the following service which took place a couple of hours later the same day.
...a small team of experts. Product person, UI person, couple of project managers/coordinators, 10 engineers. App for under £2m; broader rollout tops out at £5m
Instead, we pick large teams of inexpert management consultants, and five layers down some poor coding equivalent of a fashion industry sweatshop worker does the actual work, and makes a rubbish app.
I'm reminded of a friend who'd been a preprint specialist and worked on web pages going to a presentation at his new employer (an insurance company where he was doing graphics in the marketing department) where they breathlessly talked up this thing called the "world wide web" and the "wonderful" web pages they'd just paid $2million to get setup
The entire staff present burst out laughing at the presenter and the managers then showed them the much nicer (and standards compliant) web pages they'd knocked up a couple of weeks earlier for a cost of about $20k if the hours were chargeable (which they weren't) for a pitch they were preparing about taking the company online
By all accounts the expensive pages were awfull, looked like they'd been coded by a 5 year old andwould have damaged the company's reputation if they'd seen light of day
Well it's Deloitte so if my experience is anything to go by half of the total will be going to the directors billing £3k a day for "strategic advisory", half of the remainder will be off to the crusty freelancer actually building the thing based on his 15-years-out-of-date-experience and the last 25% split between the 25 graduates paid to make the offices/zoom meetings look busy.
I looked at that figure. And then at the figures for my county from the very start of statistics collection. Looks like England right now is ahead of the county's total cumulative cases. However it is expressed.
(No - I'll not tell you where I am! At least, not until we have all had effective vaccines.)
What I am struggling to comprehend is how you can actually spend this much money to develop a fairly simply system. Everything about the government contracts (most of which are either failed, not functional or not fit for purpose) related to COVID just stinks. This needs NAO investigations looking for fraud, incompetence, criminal actions & failings in due process. If they find any of these they all that are culpable should be thoroughly investigated and appropriate criminal or civil actions brought. Billions of pounds of public money has been syphoned off into private companies in the last year with very little to show. At the very beginning it was almost possible to justify IF those contracts had actually delivered. Many appear to have not delivered anything useable at all. This is theft and fraud at a national level one would associate with some tin-pot dictator run country in Africa or South America.
On one level I don't care who is at fault, I just want then to be held accountable and face the consequences of their actions:
Ministers who awarded the contracts
Civil servants that condoned them
The companies that were supposed to deliver the goods or services.
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