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After weeks of pressure, and just a fortnight before the self-isolation rules fundamentally changed, the decision to tweak the NHS Test & Trace app is an act of political capitulation rather than pandemic management.
For weeks, business groups have pointed out that the pingemia is turning the grand reopening into a colossal COVID to close.
When supermarket shelves have started to empty the government granted a few bureaucratic exemptions, but in hospitality pings the premises were closed just as they were trying to make up for months of lost income.
As businesses lost revenue, staff lost valuable salaries, yet another blow after 18 months of instability.
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Growing calls to end isolation of NHS alerts
Still, ministers insisted that self-isolation remained the best way to deal with the pandemic, even after Boris Johnson himself attempted to skip the requirements by joining a test and release pilot.
Now the the application has been adjusted, but not the sensitivity of two meters. Instead, the timeframe for measuring close contacts of asymptomatic positive cases was reduced from five days to two.
According to the Department of Health and Social Affairs, this will result in fewer pings but the same number of “high-risk” contacts being asked to self-isolate.
Oddly enough, this appears to be the first time the government has identified a sub-category of riskier contacts with COVID cases, and may be the first mention of the five-day infection window.
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Starmer: “We are witnessing a summer of chaos”
If there has been a fundamental questioning of the risk of close contact, the government does not explain it.
On the contrary, new research suggests that the app prevented an additional 50,000 infections last month, and nearly a million since December.
If this all sounds a bit confusing, it’s the inevitable consequence of the glaring flaw in an app that confined people to their homes, based on monitoring a two-meter gap that had been abandoned in the real world.
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