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I reckon the one thing "Project Moonshot" actually demonstrates is how much media coverage of Covid-19 is partisan horseshit. It's basically identical to what t

by makomk 6y ago

I reckon the one thing "Project Moonshot" actually demonstrates is how much media coverage of Covid-19 is partisan horseshit. It's basically identical to what the New York Times and other American media publications have been claiming the US desperately needed for months, and they portrayed it as a neat, easy solution that the US would have had months ago if not for Trump's incompentence. Yet when the UK government and Boris Johnson - who is seen as our equivalent of Trump - attempts something similar, suddenly there's a wave of news articles in the UK context about how it's impossible, the tech doesn't even exist, it would have far too many false positives, and so on. Pretty much the exact same plan is being spun in the UK as a delusional distraction by right-wing populists that pushes a quick fix where none exists, and in the US as a easy fix that would've happened if not for the incompetent right-wing populists refusing to do it as part of an evil cover-up. (Needless to say, pretty much all the problems with false positives, inadequate technology, the diffculty of scaling up, etc would have been much bigger problems in the US a few months ago given the much larger population and the improvements in Covid-19 testing technology since then.)

Quarrelsome 6y ago
I think part of the larger argument is that modern FPTP politics is so partisan its very hard to judge anymore what criticism is valid and which is just mud slinging. _Everything_ the opposition does is the _worst_ thing ever and nobody ever congratulates the other side on anything they do that could be good. This makes it hard to separate out hyperbolic criticism of borderline cases and legitimate criticism of clear outliers. 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.
- a3camero 6y ago
  This is an impression that TV and Twitter give. But politicians in all countries often say positive things about policies and ideas they like. But that’s not newsworthy so it appears to not be common.
jon-wood 6y ago
My view on this is that there’d be a lot less grief being handed out over Project Moonshot if the existing solutions were being given the same level of focus on making them work. The current plan from the UK government is equivalent to a software developer responding to a bug report by rewriting the whole application - it may well work, but it’ll be massively more expensive, and come with a whole host of new unknown problems. 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.
- makomk 6y ago
  Right now in the UK, the basic testing infrastructure is more-or-less world class as far as I can tell, with a level of testing that's basically unprecedented outside of the US (though some other European countries are catching up over the last few weeks) - it's still having trouble coping right now, but that seems to be the case throughout Europe and elsewhere too. That is very much not the impression you'd get from the media. They keep pushing stupid narratives like the UK needing South Korea-style mass testing when in reality the UK is testing about an order of magnitude more people for Covid, and South Korea charges most people with symptoms for testing in order to discourage them from getting tested and using up the limited capacity whilst the UK tests for free. Also, the government also seems to be working on the testing infrastructure - from what I can tell, the problem is that as it turns out that things like expanding testing capacity has a lot of lead time, and the capacity expansion is a couple of weeks later than it ideally should have been.
  - chimprich 6y ago
    > Right now in the UK, the basic testing infrastructure is more-or-less world class as far as I can tell If you believe the government's figures it is, but they have history in misrepresenting the data. The leak a day or two ago suggests they are inflating the figures again (62k tests per day actually carried out v. claimed capacity for 375k a day). See e.g. https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-covid-testing-programme-in-chaos-amid-185-000-swab-backlog-leaked-documents-show-12070814 https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-covid-testing-program... I appreciate the challenges are significant, but I'd have a lot more confidence in the system if they were just honest about the problems they were facing.
Traster 6y ago
I think you're just conflating two quite different approaches. The US, for example has ordered 150m tests in it's latest deal - or enough to test half the US population. The UK is announcing a project to do 10m tests per day - or about the whole UK population in a week. The NYT currently has this infographic [1] about whether states are testing enough and whilst it varies depending on how the states are doing, but no one is close to suggesting that they need 15,000 tests per capita per day - it's in the hundreds per capita per day. 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-testing.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-test...
charlesarthur 6y ago
Not quite accurate. It's not "basically identical". The "moonshot" proposal is that you'd be able to walk up to, say, a cinema entrance and get a PCR test right there which would instantly tell you whether you're +ve for Covid. (Not antibody-positive, but infected/infective-positive.) 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.
vannevar 6y ago
(Needless to say, pretty much all the problems with false positives, inadequate technology, the diffculty of scaling up, etc would have been much bigger problems in the US a few months ago given the much larger population and the improvements in Covid-19 testing technology since then.) 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.

by makomk 6y ago

Quarrelsome 6y ago

I think part of the larger argument is that modern FPTP politics is so partisan its very hard to judge anymore what criticism is valid and which is just mud slinging. _Everything_ the opposition does is the _worst_ thing ever and nobody ever congratulates the other side on anything they do that could be good. This makes it hard to separate out hyperbolic criticism of borderline cases and legitimate criticism of clear outliers. 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.

a3camero 6y ago
This is an impression that TV and Twitter give. But politicians in all countries often say positive things about policies and ideas they like. But that’s not newsworthy so it appears to not be common.

jon-wood 6y ago

My view on this is that there’d be a lot less grief being handed out over Project Moonshot if the existing solutions were being given the same level of focus on making them work. The current plan from the UK government is equivalent to a software developer responding to a bug report by rewriting the whole application - it may well work, but it’ll be massively more expensive, and come with a whole host of new unknown problems. 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.

makomk 6y ago
Right now in the UK, the basic testing infrastructure is more-or-less world class as far as I can tell, with a level of testing that's basically unprecedented outside of the US (though some other European countries are catching up over the last few weeks) - it's still having trouble coping right now, but that seems to be the case throughout Europe and elsewhere too. That is very much not the impression you'd get from the media. They keep pushing stupid narratives like the UK needing South Korea-style mass testing when in reality the UK is testing about an order of magnitude more people for Covid, and South Korea charges most people with symptoms for testing in order to discourage them from getting tested and using up the limited capacity whilst the UK tests for free. Also, the government also seems to be working on the testing infrastructure - from what I can tell, the problem is that as it turns out that things like expanding testing capacity has a lot of lead time, and the capacity expansion is a couple of weeks later than it ideally should have been.
- chimprich 6y ago
  > Right now in the UK, the basic testing infrastructure is more-or-less world class as far as I can tell If you believe the government's figures it is, but they have history in misrepresenting the data. The leak a day or two ago suggests they are inflating the figures again (62k tests per day actually carried out v. claimed capacity for 375k a day). See e.g. https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-covid-testing-programme-in-chaos-amid-185-000-swab-backlog-leaked-documents-show-12070814 https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-covid-testing-program... I appreciate the challenges are significant, but I'd have a lot more confidence in the system if they were just honest about the problems they were facing.

Traster 6y ago

I think you're just conflating two quite different approaches. The US, for example has ordered 150m tests in it's latest deal - or enough to test half the US population. The UK is announcing a project to do 10m tests per day - or about the whole UK population in a week. The NYT currently has this infographic [1] about whether states are testing enough and whilst it varies depending on how the states are doing, but no one is close to suggesting that they need 15,000 tests per capita per day - it's in the hundreds per capita per day. 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-testing.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-test...

charlesarthur 6y ago

Not quite accurate. It's not "basically identical". The "moonshot" proposal is that you'd be able to walk up to, say, a cinema entrance and get a PCR test right there which would instantly tell you whether you're +ve for Covid. (Not antibody-positive, but infected/infective-positive.) 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.

vannevar 6y ago

(Needless to say, pretty much all the problems with false positives, inadequate technology, the diffculty of scaling up, etc would have been much bigger problems in the US a few months ago given the much larger population and the improvements in Covid-19 testing technology since then.) 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.