What would be a short term crisis business plan to get test/trace/isolate working again?
Whatever the behind the scenes qualities or lack of them, I think it would have to involve the letting go of Dido Harding, and the termination of the existing contracts to Serco. To instill confidence that there was a recognition a fresh start was needed.
Never having had a business, or written a plan, this task is not my forte. Also complicated by a lifetime, until now, of lacking curiosity in logistics.
The consensus seems to be that the effort needs to be devolved to local areas, to currently state employed public health teams, and away from the private, centralized body we have set up now.
But is the central monolith useless, or should it retain some residual function and funding? And what, in detail, does the local effort, look like? Who does what, when? Which international precedent is being copied?
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Relative to where the government was at the time of the first lockdown in March, it seems much less enthusiastic about 1) doing what is necessary to stop the virus spreading and 2) providing compensation for those affected and to encourage them to comply with new meaures.
This is perplexing. The opposite should be the case. Relative to March, we are in some ways in a much better position to accomplish this.
To begin with, even at this late stage, things are not as bad as they had been allowed to get by the 23 March. It therefore would not take such draconian measures, or for so long, to get control again.
It’s a cruel irony that when policy makers most need high quality data - in the midst of an economic crisis - they are least likely to have it.
New things happen to people [covid] and you have to collect data on them from scratch, developing new systems and standards.
Government measures to react to the crisis affect national accounts and labour market status, close markets for goods, confusing income, employment, unemployment, welfare and price data.
Brilliant letter. Since the optimal policy response to a pandemic is also an economic policy, and not just a health policy, I hope that there might be a consensus forged across both epidemiology and economics too. I for one concur with the prescription in this text.
Really, the matter also draws in political scientists. Because both the prescribed poilcy and the do-nothing counterfactual entail novel and dramatic political-economic forces.
The do-nothing policy envisages a hefty multiple of the circa 60k deaths we have seen; we talk often about how the financial crisis scarred attitudes towards the status quo - how would 200k deaths leave its imprint on politics and civil society?
1. Covid has shown us that we need a bigger, better, state. 2. Taxes will eventually have to rise to pay for that. 3. Many other economies with high GDP/head function well with higher taxes, larger states, so 'high tax damages business', is, to a point, a canard.
But...
4. Macro stabilisation priorities mean that it is too soon to be thinking of raising taxes yet.
5. Not the case here, but often on the right the 'high tax will damage business' is just cover for 'small state means the rich keep more for themselves'.