What's remarkable is that the people with years of experience in the field of testing and tracing with respect to notifiable diseases are already out there sitting in local authorities, under the control of DPHs, largely doing nothing because they've been excluded from the process. We even had systems for scaling up by training existing staff in other departments to help in the event of ID outbreaks affecting hundreds of people.
The only thing that has been missing is the system for linking their findings into a national network for daily reporting. I could see that this would need private sector involvement, given my experience of LA and NHS IT systems. I see some DPHs/LAs have now decided to go their own way on this and I don't blame them.
A while back, I rang my old team, expecting them to be out and about interviewing and perhaps worried about the risk to their own health but I needn't have been concerned - their own involvement in the process was zero.
