Generic Virus Thread

[snowychap]

7 minutes ago, Genie said:

Its a stupid comparison.

It wasn't a comparison in the way in which you keep on suggesting.

Edited November 24, 2020 by snowychap

[Stevo985]

11 minutes ago, Genie said:

Nailed it. It’s 2 vastly different products.

Let’s let boots do all the nations testing them as it’ll be much cheaper?

Well they can’t manage that many people, and they’ll need appointments, and they’ll need extra staff, and they need special designated areas in the stores, and we can’t have thousands of ill people walking around shops and shopping centres, and what about people that can’t get to the shop? What about those in hospitals and care homes? What about health workers? There’s many, many reasons why you can’t compare posting a box of tests to Boots for a few people a day to buy to a national test scheme... and that’s before you even think about the trace element.

Its a stupid comparison.

But, again, I don't think anyone is suggesting this. It's a straw man.

 

[snowychap]

15 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I also don't understand why he is talking about *the cost of a test* when the figure given is for the *test and trace* system. Obviously the 'tracing' part is a large part of the cost! You don't get call centres full of contact tracers for free.

(That being said, it does seem like a huge sum of money)

Because he's merely using the price of a private test multiplied by the number of tests carried out so far to come up with a ball park figure of what the testing may have cost (he says 'even if you assume a cost per test of...) up until now against which to measure the entire funding for the year for the whole system.

So that, assuming a cost per test of the price for an individual to get a private test (i.e. probably being overly generous with regards to the cost of those tests undertaken so far), one is still left with a figure of about £17.4bn to justify - split between tracing so far and testing and tracing in the future.

 

[Genie]

2 minutes ago, snowychap said:

It wasn't a comparison in the way in which you keep on suggesting.

Please advise me what it is comparing then.
To me it looks like a comparison of the 2021 budget for test and trace at £22b and the hypothetical fact that if all of the 38million tests done so far were done at Boots we’d only have spent about £4.6b.

[Genie]

8 minutes ago, snowychap said:

Because he's merely using the price of a private test multiplied by the number of tests carried out so far to come up with a ball park figure of what the testing may have cost

It would never has cost that, because Boots or other pharmacy would not have been able to do 38 million tests in the way they were needed.

[Stevo985]

8 minutes ago, Genie said:

Please advise me what it is comparing then.
To me it looks like a comparison of the 2021 budget for test and trace at £22b and the hypothetical fact that if all of the 38million tests done so far were done at Boots we’d only have spent about £4.6b.

But he's not saying they should be the same.

He's using a known figure of £120 to approximate the testing part of the £22bn, and wondering how there's 18bn left over. he's not suggesting there should be NOTHING left over, just that he can't understand why it's so much.

 

To use your car analogy, he's saying "The new Range Rover has cost £10billion to produce. But if I add up all the material and engineering costs I only get to £1bn"

i.e. he's not saying that's ALL it should cost. Just that he's surprised there's so much extra cost

[snowychap]

3 minutes ago, Genie said:

Please advise me what it is comparing then.
To me it looks like a comparison of the 2021 budget for test and trace at £22b and the hypothetical fact that if all of the 38million tests done so far were done at Boots we’d only have spent about £4.6b.

See above, it's about taking an assumption of a unit cost (based on the price charged for something similar privately, i.e. probably with a profit level factored in over and above the similar other costs, which might well be expected to be a higher unit cost than would have been paid by the Government) multiplying that by the number of tests so far done and taking the figure which one has arrived at from the overall figure for the year to question how this overall budget is made up.

There are four pices of the pie and he has arrived at a figure for one of them. It seems not just a reasonable calculation but also a reasonably generous calculation. Even allowing for that, he struggles to see how the other pieces of the pie will add up to the £22bn.

 

[snowychap]

6 minutes ago, Genie said:

It would never has cost that, because Boots or other pharmacy would not have been able to do 38 million tests in the way they were needed.

I'm sorry but what on earth are you on about?

We are talking about unit costs (and one taking a benchmark as the unit price in the private sector).

Edited November 24, 2020 by snowychap

[chrisp65]

I know that in Maesteg they’re offering vaccination, pie, and a pint for £7.99 and they’re expected a good take up of that.

[choffer]

Currently watching the Secretary of State for Health being questioned by MPs. It’s staggering to me to think that anyone could watch this and not (correctly) conclude that he’s not a complete bluffer. 

[Genie]

1 minute ago, snowychap said:

I'm sorry but what on earth are you on about?

We are talking about unit costs (and one taking a benchmark as the unit price in the private sector).

You said “what the testing may have cost” I.e. getting 38,000,000 tests done by a private shop chain which is an silly comparison. It would never happen, if it was outsourced it would not be the same price for many reasons.

Also, the tweet is comparing the cost going forward against the tests that have already happened. We know going forward we continue to do more tests.

In July we’d apparently spent £10b on test and trace completing 31 million tests. If that was 100% spent on testing then it’s about £322 a test. Obviously the split of cost for tracing is not known (to me anyway). If trace is say one third of the budget then each test has cost about £214 each. Not that surprising all things considered if Boots are charging £120 to hand one over the counter.

[HanoiVillan]

5 minutes ago, snowychap said:

There are four pices of the pie and he has arrived at a figure for one of them. It seems not just a reasonable calculation but also a reasonably generous calculation. Even allowing for that, he struggles to see how the other pieces of the pie will add up to the £22bn.

To even guess at 'how the other pieces of the pie will add up to the £22bn', he needs to have a theory of how much they 'should' cost, which he has not presented, and I don't see how he could have such a theory without knowing a lot more about the structure of the test-and-trace architecture being set up, the goals of the program, the envisioned permanence or otherwise of any teams and organisations being set up, and on and on.

The big picture questions he appears to be asking - why is the budget for this program so large? Does it need to be? Does that reflect inefficiency or corruption? - are important questions. It would be great if journalists were doing research and writing articles about this, and I hope some will. The quibble with his tweet is that his back-of-a-napkin calculations of how much tests have cost do not really help guide us toward an answer to these questions, and that more reporting and detailed analysis is needed.

[bannedfromHandV]

24 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I know that in Maesteg they’re offering vaccination, pie, and a pint for £7.99 and they’re expected a good take up of that.

Distributed by Wetherspoons?

[snowychap]

7 minutes ago, Genie said:

You said “what the testing may have cost” I.e. getting 38,000,000 tests done by a private shop chain which is an silly comparison.

No, I never said anything about a private shop chain. You are the one who has been banging on about Boots - it would seem that you think this is some sort of trump card in your 'argument'.

9 minutes ago, Genie said:

Also, the tweet is comparing the cost going forward against the tests that have already happened. We know going forward we continue to do more tests.

You are stating this as though it hasn't been taken in to account by the person tweeting or in the context of the discussion in this thread. It has, both implicitly and explicitly.

10 minutes ago, Genie said:

In July we’d apparently spent £10b on test and trace completing 31 million tests. If that was 100% spent on testing then it’s about £322 a test.

No one has said it was spent 100% on testing. It's something you've made up in your head so you can carry on a bizarre argument about a tweet (or one of three actually) that you have failed to understand properly.

12 minutes ago, Genie said:

Obviously the split of cost for tracing is not known (to me anyway).

Indeed. It's one of the things that perhaps we ought to be asking questions about and perhaps we could do that by making some sort of assumtion about what the level of testing up to a certain point (be it July or now) had cost.

13 minutes ago, Genie said:

If trace is say one third of the budget then each test has cost about £214 each. Not that surprising all things considered if Boots are charging £120 to hand one over the counter.

It's interesting because what you argument actually boils down to (when you wipe away all the nonsense about 'comparisons') is an objection to the assumption of the unit cost of the tests in the guy's tweet (based on a unit price in another sphere) and the objection is that you believe that the figure is a fair bit higher based on nothing more than your assumption pulled out of thin air.

It's quite a different argument to the one you've been making so far and it, in itself, throws up a whole lot of different questions including understanding the difference between cost and price.

But I'm off for a walk over the hills so I'll leave you to it.

[snowychap]

21 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

To even guess at 'how the other pieces of the pie will add up to the £22bn', he needs to have a theory of how much they 'should' cost, which he has not presented, and I don't see how he could have such a theory without knowing a lot more about the structure of the test-and-trace architecture being set up, the goals of the program, the envisioned permanence or otherwise of any teams and organisations being set up, and on and on.

The big picture questions he appears to be asking - why is the budget for this program so large? Does it need to be? Does that reflect inefficiency or corruption? - are important questions. It would be great if journalists were doing research and writing articles about this, and I hope some will. The quibble with his tweet is that his back-of-a-napkin calculations of how much tests have cost do not really help guide us toward an answer to these questions, and that more reporting and detailed analysis is needed.

There are a number of things here but one is that it's just a couple of tweets that might kickstart some people's thoughts on the matter and then some investigation.

Not everything should require full, detailed reporting and analysis before any comment can be made. Indeed were that the case then very little talk of things that are already seriously being questioned would have happened or, by your proscriptions, would have been given much time (for an alarm bell set off by a basic unit cost discrepancy see one of the Good Law Project's investigations in to one of the PPE things).

In an ideal world where information on all of these projects is free-flowing and forthcoming to all who may want to hold Government or a particular quango to account then getting all ducks in a row before fully questioning things might be the way to go. But where a Government refuses often and repeatedly to give out information (perhaps not on Test and Trace this time but they've been doing that throughout the year and beyond - again see the various PPE stuff and Brexit contracts) then an alarm bell and a question posed because of it may have to do. It doesn't, of course, constitute anything more than a raised eyebrow and it may not turn out to be anything but I do find the dismissal of it in this thread (especially the method of dismissal) both quite amusing and quite disturbing.

Bye for now.

[bickster]

F*** me, them's small hills @snowychap back in 15 mins!

[Genie]

 

34 minutes ago, snowychap said:

It's interesting because what you argument actually boils down to (when you wipe away all the nonsense about 'comparisons') is an objection to the assumption of the unit cost of the tests in the guy's tweet (based on a unit price in another sphere) and the objection is that you believe that the figure is a fair bit higher based on nothing more than your assumption pulled out of thin air.

It's quite a different argument to the one you've been making so far and it, in itself, throws up a whole lot of different questions including understanding the difference between cost and price.

You’re now making irrelevant comments to try and muddy the water. Classic.

Be honest, the tweet you posted was a dig at the government for increasing the budget for test and trace to a hefty £22 billion. In support of the criticism there is the calculation that at the private cost of £120 (which Boots were in famously charging hence me using them as an example) it only comes to £4.6 billion. But it’s a silly comparison because a private company couldn’t do what what has been done for the same price as handing a test over the counter. It also doesn’t consider the cost of tracing.
It’s also silly because it’s using a qty of tests done at a point in the past versus the cost which stretches into the future and includes many more million tests which have not yet been done.

34 minutes ago, snowychap said:

But I'm off for a walk over the hills so I'll leave you to it.

I’ll look forward to your reply in 8 hours time followed by you declaring to “leave it there”  

Edited November 24, 2020 by Genie

[snowychap]

19 minutes ago, bickster said:

F*** me, them's small hills @snowychap back in 15 mins!

Had to have lunch - off now.

[sidcow]

9 hours ago, TheAuthority said:

I see this speculation a lot. Why and what in your view will change? I see subtle changes in my industry. But I also imagine that once the majority of folks in the West are  inoculated I can see a months of meals out, family trips, partying and full on revelry. Another summer of love for 2021.

Interested to hear why this won't happen. Will people decide they prefer being miserable hermits stuck at home 24-7? 

I've been thinking exactly that.

Most people can't wait to get back out travelling, shopping, eating and most especially drinking. 

Visiting families, going to watch sports, visiting theatres, going to Cinema, Gyms, Kiddies play centres. 

I think people are massively overestimating peoples reluctance to go back to how we were.  I think most are gagging to get back to normal. 

I think there will be some work pattern changes but I think even these will start to go back to normal when the team structure starts to break down with prolonged isolation from the company/team ethos.  I've a feeling that companies that go hard down the home working route will start to see efficiency slip over time and lose employee buy in. 

There will definitely be more video conferencing on lower value contracts though. 

[sidcow]

8 hours ago, snowychap said:

the idea of checking in to places and venues with QR codes would be a good bet to become quite standard (possibly required by places on some sort of claim of H&S/fire safety/security/licensing or maybe by way of commercial incentives offered by stores, &c.). 

Politically I can't see any way this will happen. 

Remember the objections to identity cards. Anything which tracks and records movements will have massive objections. (yet bizzairely 99% of the population are perfectly happy to have Apple and Google track their movements, no problem there at all)