Flawed contrasts between test and trace systems go viral

A post comparing the cost of Covid-19 test and trace systems in Wales, England and the Republic of Ireland has been going viral on social media. 

We’ve looked at these sorts of claims before. They use uncomparable figures and are highly misleading. 

Ireland

The post in question starts by claiming that “Irish Test and Trace cost £775,000”. 

This is not true. This only covers the cost of the Irish contact tracing app, not the whole system, which the chief executive of the Irish Health Service Executive has said could cost €700 million for the first year.

The Irish app launched in July 2020, when it was announced that it cost around €850,000 (or around £765,000 as of January 2021) to develop and would have an annual running cost of €350,000 to €400,000. 

Wales

The post then says that “Welsh Test and Trace cost £102 million.”

This figure doesn’t provide the full picture. The Welsh government did allocate £102 million to the Welsh Test Trace and Protect programme across its first and second supplementary budgets, but this isn’t its total cost.

A Welsh Government spokesperson told us: “Our funding for Test Trace and Protect includes supporting developments in our NHS Wales testing and sampling system and contact tracing both nationally and locally.”

These elements are only a part of the Test Trace and Protect programme which also includes wider community testing (often referred to as pillar 2 testing which makes up most of the testing regime) and new infrastructure such as laboratories.A spokesperson for the Welsh government added that the UK government  “provides services on a four nations basis for testing sampling and laboratories, and new technology.”  

England

Finally the post claims that England’s Test and Trace system cost £22 billion.

This is the amount of money allocated to Test and Trace in 2020/21 by the UK government, but the amount spent has been considerably lower.

Up to October £4 billion had been spent, one third less than was planned by that point, with considerable underspends on laboratories, machines and mass testing.

As mentioned above, this money is not just spent in England. For example the NAO reports that, to October 2020, £1.3 billion had been spent on laboratories from this budget, which includes labs in all four UK nations.

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