
'Moonshot' hype illustrates the UK government's obsession with tech hyperbole - gemmamilne
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/15/moonshot-no-10-tech-hyperbole
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Mindwipe
This is a good piece.

They also take a similar approach to regulation - the age verification
strategy was going to be "world leading" and fell apart before it launched.
The new Online Harms bill will also be "world leading" but is now supposed to
solve so many complex cross societal problems it will also inevitably implode.

It's not really tech specific I think, just that the current government in
particular is obsessed with thinking they are super naturally gifted because
they own a lot of flags, and like to repeat slogans over any nuanced thinking.

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chaz6
It isn't the government's obsession, it is from Dominic Cummings, an unelected
beaurocrat, the likes of which many people voted in favour of brexit to get
rid of (so they thought).

~~~
DanBC
Current Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Care has
pushed "better tech" as a solution for all of the NHS's problems since before
he got the job.

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makomk
I reckon the one thing "Project Moonshot" actually demonstrates is how much
media coverage of Covid-19 is partisan horseshit. It's basically identical to
what the New York Times and other American media publications have been
claiming the US desperately needed for months, and they portrayed it as a
neat, easy solution that the US would have had months ago if not for Trump's
incompentence. Yet when the UK government and Boris Johnson - who is seen as
our equivalent of Trump - attempts something similar, suddenly there's a wave
of news articles in the UK context about how it's impossible, the tech doesn't
even exist, it would have far too many false positives, and so on. Pretty much
the exact same plan is being spun in the UK as a delusional distraction by
right-wing populists that pushes a quick fix where none exists, and in the US
as a easy fix that would've happened if not for the incompetent right-wing
populists refusing to do it as part of an evil cover-up. (Needless to say,
pretty much all the problems with false positives, inadequate technology, the
diffculty of scaling up, etc would have been much bigger problems in the US a
few months ago given the much larger population and the improvements in
Covid-19 testing technology since then.)

~~~
jon-wood
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.

~~~
makomk
Right now in the UK, the basic testing infrastructure is more-or-less world
class as far as I can tell, with a level of testing that's basically
unprecedented outside of the US (though some other European countries are
catching up over the last few weeks) - it's still having trouble coping right
now, but that seems to be the case throughout Europe and elsewhere too. That
is very much not the impression you'd get from the media. They keep pushing
stupid narratives like the UK needing South Korea-style mass testing when in
reality the UK is testing about an order of magnitude more people for Covid,
and South Korea charges most people with symptoms for testing in order to
discourage them from getting tested and using up the limited capacity whilst
the UK tests for free.

Also, the government also seems to be working on the testing infrastructure -
from what I can tell, the problem is that as it turns out that things like
expanding testing capacity has a lot of lead time, and the capacity expansion
is a couple of weeks later than it ideally should have been.

~~~
chimprich
> Right now in the UK, the basic testing infrastructure is more-or-less world
> class as far as I can tell

If you believe the government's figures it is, but they have history in
misrepresenting the data.

The leak a day or two ago suggests they are inflating the figures again (62k
tests per day actually carried out v. claimed capacity for 375k a day).

See e.g. [https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-covid-testing-
program...](https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-covid-testing-programme-in-
chaos-amid-185-000-swab-backlog-leaked-documents-show-12070814)

I appreciate the challenges are significant, but I'd have a lot more
confidence in the system if they were just honest about the problems they were
facing.

~~~
makomk
That's not what the article you linked says. It actually says that only 62,000
people are getting tested _for the first time_ every day. This isn't
officially published as a daily stat anymore because it's confusing and not
all that useful - there are good reasons why people get tested more than once,
for example because they develop potential symptoms again or perhaps more
commonly in order to protect hospitals and care homes by testing people before
they're admitted to hospital, during their stay, and before they're discharged
to a care home. The number of repeat tests is also going to keep going up as
time goes on for really obvious reasons that have nothing to do with testing
failing.

Now, admittedly it is worded in such a way as to trick people into making the
exact mistake you just did. These two sentences are a work of art: "Labelled
"official: sensitive", the Department of Health and Social Care report seen by
The Sunday Times says most British laboratories are processing fewer tests
than their stated capacity due to problems in supply chains. The newspaper
said that despite government claims that its system has capacity for 375,000
tests a day, the equivalent of just 62,000 people a day were newly tested in
the first week of September." It's very carefully structured to make it sound
like only 62,000 people are being tested a day and the rest of the capacity is
going idle due to supply chain issues, even though in reality that's not
what's happening and there is _pretty much no casual link between the two
facts it 's using to make people think that_.

(The testing delay figures also look, off-hand, very similar to what I've seen
from other countries around the globe lately.)

~~~
chimprich
OK, I am sure you are correct. But the government is doing a lousy job of
presenting the data and their history of massaging the figures does not
inspire confidence.

Their assignment of tests is also awful. I know several healthcare workers who
have been out of work for a week while trying to get tested, and surely they
should be prioritised.

I don't think total number of tests processed is the only criterion for
labelling the system "world class".

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collyw
Coronavisrus seem like complete hyperbole at this stage. 1% of deaths in the
UK were from Covid yesterday.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Right, because of the drastic measures taken. If these measures are halted,
that figure will skyrocket. The pandemic isn't over in the UK, it's currently
under control, despite incredible expense.

Also, people who get the virus and survive may still have permanent lung
damage. There's more to it than the death rate.

~~~
collyw
It not orders of magnitude worse than a bad flu season, yet the response has
been unprecedented. Sweden has managed fine without any lockdown (and it's not
a competition over death rates before someone starts comparing). Hospitals
didn't get overwhelmed anywhere which was what the reason for lock down was
all about (originally). They appear to have reached some level of herd
immunity.

If hardly anyone is dying can it still be classed as a pandemic? No one
bothers about a "cold pandemic", which is effectively what coronavirus is at
this stage. Deaths per day are in single digits.

And you can't claim "permanent lung damage" for something that has only been
around for 7 months.

~~~
matthewmacleod
It’s not “orders of magnitude worse than a bad flu season” precisely because
the _entire country shut down for months_

~~~
collyw
> precisely because the entire country shut down for months

The way to test your hypothesis would be to look at countries that didn't lock
down.

Sweden didn't shut down and had a similar outcome to most European countries.
Hospitals were not overwhelmed. Looking at Euromomo they had it relatively
mild in terms of excess deaths for the time of year.
[https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/](https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-
maps/)

