[llimos]

> From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Kingdom (UK) government has made it a top priority to track key health metrics and to share those metrics with the public.

According to Dominic Cummings (ex-adviser to the PM), this isn't true at all - one of their biggest failings early on was to not have the data and not see the priority in getting it.[1]

[1] https://news.sky.com/story/dominic-cummings-hearing-the-insi... : He added later that there was no data system at that point, and he needed to use his iphone as a calculator to make predictions about the extent to which infections would spread, which he then wrote down on a white board.

[zarzavat]

It's worth noting for those who don't follow UK politics (I don't recommend doing so), that Dominic Cummings was fired as the top advisor, and like a jealous ex he is determined to bring down the government by any means possible. So he is an unreliable source to say the least. Although the government seems to have left enough rope to hang themselves without Cummings needing to invent anything.

[Closi]

The government was tracking key health metrics and sharing them at the point Dom was talking about using his iPhone. For instance on the same date, the government did it's first daily briefing and shared infection and death metrics with the public (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51901818).

Tracking key health metrics and sharing those metrics with the public doesn't mean that there is modelling about the extent to which infections would spread - although we also know that the imperial modelling was released a day later, so while he may have been using his iPhone to make predictions there were also academic teams modelling this that were collaborating with the government at the time (see https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/196234/covid-19-imperial-res...).

It's also not clear what a 'data system' is in this context - there was clearly an effort to very quickly put something in place to capture data (because it couldn't wait a few weeks/months), but a more robust analytics system will inevitably take more than a few weeks to put in place if not already in place pre-pandemic (a lot of this is about how NHS trusts are structured in the UK, which operate fairly independently). It's not clear to me how quickly is realistic to implement what Dom thought was suitable in terms of a 'data system', particularly as I'm not particularly clear on his requirements (he seems to want an element of forecasting built into this system for instance?), so without knowing what the requirements are can we be confident that what he wanted to build was possible to build, test and implement in his expected timeline?

So I don't think there is a clear contradiction here (and in fact, I think the evidence points to the fact that the statement in the article is probably correct).

[iamstupidsimple]

From watching his testimony I believe Cummings was disappointed that this 'data system' wasn't available before the pandemic, precisely because that few week delay putting one together meant everything.

[Closi]

> I believe Cummings was disappointed that this 'data system' wasn't available before the pandemic, precisely because that few week delay putting one together meant everything.

It's very easy to say that something should have been there after the fact, and harder to build a system for an unknown-threat before you have any clear requirements.

It's also not clear to me what data a 'data system' would have provided that would have meaningfully changed any policy (and if it didn't affect policy, I'm not sure how it can 'mean everything').

What data did the government not have in March 2020 that they could have collected with some sort of pre-built 'data system'? In reality the bigger issue in understanding the situation at the time was that we couldn't identify all the covid cases anyway because there wasn't enough test resource - it wasn't the lack of a 'data system'.

[rob_c]

Yes but Cummings deliberately asked questions which are fundamentally unknowable and went with report9 which claimed to be all knowing...

> "and to share those metrics with the public" Given stats on how many patients were in ICU didn't officially exist so you couldnt request them with an FOI request I'll let you work out how true this is. They wanted to control the data to craft a narrative to justify the report9 claims we'd have plague bodies in the streets because this is the end of days...

[lozenge]

Well, it depends what time period you're talking about.

In early March 2020, they briefly announced that the daily COVID figures would move to a weekly cadence.

When locking down, they were still flying blind, and after that (during Hancock's 100k tests a day moonshot) there were leaks that "figures were being compiled in a notebook by calling round different labs".