Day: 26 October 2020

by Thucydides I see you have already received a lot of postcards from around the world, but none yet from the country with the longest and most irrational quarantine on the planet! So, allow me to fill in some of the gap (be warned, this gets long). I am a professor in an area of the social sciences (non-woke) related to international politics, and also do some policy analysis for a private institution. Although I miss meeting my students (online classes are in no way a replacement for in-person interaction), I am lucky that my work was not interrupted by the lockdown, my financial position is secure enough that I am well prepared to ride this out. But millions of people are not. South America being so far from the initial outbreaks, we had the benefit of seeing the pandemic unfold earlier almost everywhere else, but it did not do us much good. The images from northern Italy made a strong impression here, since so many people here are descended from Italian immigrants and our cultures have much in common. So, in late March, the Government decided to lock down hard, with the well known argument of flattening the infection curve to allow our inadequate third-world health system to cope with the expected influx of patients. A newly-installed Government facing ...

NHS Test and Trace Whistleblower: "It's a Complete Shit Show." "Is this Humpty Dumpty? We've been given your name by someone who tested positive for COVID-19. DO NOT FALL OFF THAT WALL. YOU MUST REMAIN ON THAT WALL FOR 14 DAYS." I've been contacted by a track-and-tracer who works for one of Serco's sub-contractors. She's a Tier 3 tracer (nothing to do with lockdown 'Tiers'), which means her job is to call people who've been named as contacts by confirmed cases and advise them to self-isolate for 14 days. Sounds straightforward, right? Wrong. I'll let her take up the story. One of the most significant problems is the level of calls people are getting. People regularly say they feel harassed and bullied by us. I often call someone who says that they have just put the phone down on another contract tracer and while I’m on the line more calls are coming in.I’ll give some examples to explain why this happens.Tier 2 call handlers are tasked with speaking to someone when they test positive to take the details of everyone they've been in contact with two days prior to the onset of their symptoms, up to the time they began their 10-day isolation.Tier 3 operatives (me) then call all these contacts to tell them to isolate for 14 days.BUT this ...