'Moonshot' hype illustrates the UK government's obsession with tech hyperbole

Right now in the UK the basic testing infrastructure is a mess, people are being told to make 500 mile round trips to get tested, and then thousands of tests are being disposed of undone because of logistical issues.

Moonshot has a budget roughly equivalent to running the entirety of the NHS for a year, I can think of much better uses for that money than a project with no clear path to success, such as massively scaling up test and trace infrastructure. But of course we’re Great Britain, and so everything must be the very best. Such as the failed attempt to implement tracing apps with a custom solution rather than building on top of the Android and iOS SDKs for the purpose.

At its core I personally believe the issue is the "side taking" but its rare to find positions that are not explicitly called in advance of the news hitting.

Also, there's just an obvious messaging side to this - the plan is being deliberately amplified in the UK with "leaked" documents claiming the plan is incredibly difficult and using technology that needs to be invented, but let's use their analogy - the moonshot. The moonshot required genuine new technology to be invented, it took the best part of a decade. Suggesting that you're going to invent new technology for a problem you're also claiming to solve within 3 months is just not credible.

[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-test...

But had we initiated aggressive testing earlier, the population needing to be tested would've been much, much smaller. A single test now, with the virus widespread in the population, is worth much, much less than a test back in February. Testing effectiveness should not be measured in tests/population, but in tests/active infections. We had a great deal more leverage back in February and March, and a little testing back them would've been equivalent in effectiveness to massive amounts of testing now. It's a moving goal post, not for political reasons, but for clear epidemiological ones.

That's very different from what has been suggested for both the US and UK, which is to have widespread and easy access to PCR testing that could be turned round in, say, 24 hours so that you'd go to a testing station and then be contacted the next day to be told your status.

Given the biotech capacity of the UK and US, that sort of testing capacity should have been well within reach in about April. (However because the US decided not to go with the WHO recommendation on what RNA elements to test for, they ran into problems. I can't find out whether this is the same for the UK.) Germany was able to ramp up its testing capacity that quickly and thus didn't get the sort of criticism that the UK and US governments did.

The gap between the moonshot proposal and the suggested solution is gigantic. Speed, accuracy, availability - all of them come into it. Plus you also have to ask: why do it, when you have alternatives which could come on stream well before the moonshot tech is developed, in the form of multiple vaccine programs? And why suggest you're going to spend that amount? (£100bn sounds made up, if I'm honest. Why not 10? 50? Because 100 sounds big and round.)

So this isn't about media coverage somehow being "partisan horseshit". It really is about a proposal which, given the multiple missed targets and continual lying (about testing capacity, testing times, test facility availability and contact tracing success - all are worse than ministers admit in public statements, but are revealed in data from government departments) from the UK government, simply can't be taken seriously.

Also, people who get the virus and survive may still have permanent lung damage. There's more to it than the death rate.