Exclusive: UK govt is paying management consultants the equivalent of million and a half pound salaries to work on Test & Trace.
I’ve seen documents showing senior staff from Boston Consulting Group are being paid day rates of around £7k, equivalent to £1.5m on an annual basis.
The docs show some BCG consultants charging day rates of £7,360.
They’ve given govt a “COVID discount” of 10-15%.
That works out at £6.6k a day - equivalent to £1.5m a year.
In a single week govt is paying these senior consultants more than they pay an experienced nurse in a year
I’ve also uncovered documents showing that far from scaling down its reliance on private sector consultants, the govt has created a further 200 roles for consultants to work on the moonshot testing system. Among the recipients:
Deloitte: 84 new roles
KPMG: 50
EY: 31
Here’s the full story, now up on the @skynews website. The government is paying senior executives from private sector management consulting firms day rates of £7,000. More than any other state worker (I think including @GaryLineker): news.sky.com/story/coronavi…

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More from @EdConwaySky

15 Oct
Q: How do you make your #COVID19 situation look less scary, without actually combating the disease?
A: Fiddle with the data.
That's what's just happened here in England. Test & Trace have quietly changed their data, suddenly changing our picture of the severity of the disease 🧵
The starting point is to note that perhaps the best measure (admittedly of a bad bunch) when it comes to overall case data, is to work out the number of positive cases as a percentage of tests taken. Here is how that chart looked for England as of last week. Scary, right? Image
Given cases are rising pretty quickly, it looked v much as if by this week England's positivity rate would have been above France/Spain. So here's what the statisticians have done: changed their definition for the total number of tests. Footnote here: gov.uk/government/pub… Image
Read 6 tweets
13 Oct
Thread: Throughout the pandemic there's been plenty of attention focused on #COVID19 deaths and on what’s happened in hospitals and in care homes - for obvious and understandable reasons. But for months there’s been another phenomenon which I find deeply unsettling.
Even after lockdown ended the number of people dying at home has stayed far, far above historic levels. There have been 28k excess deaths in people’s homes - more than in hospitals, care homes or other settings. Only a fraction of these deaths are officially put down to #COVID19.
I’ve been banging on about this since early on in the pandemic. It's not a new phenomenon. But it remains stubbornly unchanged even months on, even as excess deaths in other settings - care homes and hospitals - have dropped into normal or negative levels.
Read 16 tweets
6 Oct
Jeepers the UK #COVID19 numbers are rising fast.
Another 14,542 cases over the past 24 hours.
We've been assured this is no longer the backlog effect following the data disaster.
And when you drill into the data we're now comfortably above 12k new cases a day *by test date*
Last week it looked v much from the data as if UK cases (at least as reported each day on the govt dashboard) were slowing. This week it's suddenly a v different picture. Compare the red and black lines.
#COVID19 cases are rising fast. Doubling roughly every 10 days.
How does UK compare with France/Spain? Case growth now seems to be accelerating faster than it did there.
Chart 1 is #COVID19 positive tests BY TEST DATE.
I'm going to retire my old chart because it's totally distorted by the data dump. But wave goodbye to it in chart 2
Read 6 tweets
5 Oct
How ON EARTH did the government manage to temporarily mislay 16,000 test results, putting thousands of people at risk of contracting #COVID19?
I try to explain it here.
Warning: you may find yourself shouting at the screen as you read it news.sky.com/story/coronavi…
A thread with some of the main details:
The key point (and perhaps the second most important revelation today) is that sitting at the very apex of Britain's testing system is a PHE computer system which processes test results and sends positive cases onto Test & Trace.
Now, this computer system works very well when it comes to the test result data coming in from the established pathology labs (pillar 1). There's a secure FTP link from them to something called SGSS. No problems there. But more testing these days is being done by "pillar 2"
Read 16 tweets
4 Oct
Leaving aside the implications for what we know about the spread of #COVID19, which we'll get to in a second, THIS, simply as a story about management of data, is astounding. At one of the most crucial points in the pandemic tens of thousands of positive cases were underreported. Image
We've known for some time there've been problems with #COVID19 data. There were serious problems collating data and turning it into national dashboards from early on. It was being done by hand in the early stages, we revealed in this investigation news.sky.com/story/amp/coro…
It seems those problems have not been laid to rest. Acc to @PHE_uk the explanation for what’s happened is “a technical issue… in the data load process that transfers #COVID19 positive lab results into reporting dashboards.” Thank God this was discovered within a few days... Image
Read 13 tweets
3 Oct
Blimey: 12.872 new #COVID19 cases announced in the UK.
V big number. Biggest single daily number by a long distance.
Explanation is they left some cases out of the past week’s numbers down to “technical” reasons. 🤔
I’m pretty flabbergasted. Eight days - EIGHT DAYS - of #COVID19 case numbers were being under-reported due to “a technical issue which has now been resolved”.
And even tho it’s “resolved” no clarity abt how much of the shortfall is left to be reported. Hundreds? Thousands?
Does this change our picture of the disease?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
If today's figs contain the bulk of underreported cases the trajectory remains pretty similar, tho a bit higher.
But we don't know because once again they've been abysmally vague abt the extent of this. Astounding
Read 5 tweets

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