Hacker News Reader

The UK test and trace program cost £37 billion, which was handed solely over to a company that has a long history of delivering projects poorly. By all good measures it wasn't effective in tracking COVID or preventing cases. In my opinion the government were rightly attacked over this issue.

View on HN

See, this is what I mean about there being a lot of misinformation out there. That £37 billion wasn't handed solely over to any one company - political opponents of the current government kept on falsely claiming that it was all given to Serco, but in reality only a small fraction of the Test and Trace spending went to them: https://fullfact.org/health/test-trace-march-2021/ (I think most of the money that went to Serco was ultimately spent on employing the numerous call center staff required to actually scale up manual contact tracing too.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com