Te idea that the test & trace money was wasted is partially sponsored by the fact they massively oversold what it could achieve. They sold is as an alternative to national lockdowns, but I did try to warn people that in many scenarios even a decent test & trace system wont avoidf the need for needing other strong measures, it will just buy a bit of time and give better signals about when the optimum moment to slam the brakes on is.
And the merits of that aspect are undermined if the trace bit is too slow, if you dont make it financially practical for every segment of society to self-isolate, if you delay slamming on the brakes even when the system provides clear signals that now is the right time, and if you leave big holes in the defenses against spread by leaving institutions such as schools vulnerable.
Even with those aspects squandered, I still believe in free testing for all manner of diseases and certainly this one during a nasty pandemic. I'd go as far as to say it should be a human right. But the traditional establishment view in this country is that mass testing for a whole raft of different diseases is just not worth it, and they resist such things in normal times and abnormal times. They dont mind expanding vaccine programmes to ease things like the winter flu burden, but they arent very interested in ideas such as properly testing everyone in hospital for influenza, not even if hospital spread is an important dynamic. Thats a big part of why we didnt have much testing capacity in the first place, unlike a country like Germany where mass diagnostics testing for a broader range of diseases was already something of a norm. And thats part of why the UK government felt the need to rely on huge additional claims about what the testing system could achieve when they were first announcing this new focus, it was beyond the normal establishment priorities and methods in the UK. And at the time they didnt have any other 'lights at the end of the tunnel' to go on about once the first wave peak was reached, vaccines were still some way off and they felt the need to come up with something else that they could claim would avoid the cycle of national lockdown repeating. Local lockdowns were then added to this mix once it became clear there would be resurgences of the disease once national lockdown 1 was over.
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