There is a certainty about anything the Government promises in the fight against Covid – it won’t work.
Boris Johnson placed our hopes in defeating the virus on a “world-beating” test-and-trace system. Ill-conceived and incompetently implemented, it just doesn’t work.
Now we have a new Covid app, wheeled out in a blaze of hype and encouragement for us all to sign up.
There’s only one problem – it just doesn’t work well enough to do the job it’s supposed to do.
More than 12 million civic-minded citizens heeded the Government’s call.
But at around only a fifth of the adult population, it is not enough to make it effective.
As our exposé shows today, the NHS Covid app is, to use a technical term, barmy. It doesn’t work.
Users in the same house are getting different risk alerts at the same time, or are given information contrary to local reality.
In one house, different levels of alert register in different rooms.
The app is not compatible with the most popularly used smartphones.
It’s not even linked up to the NHS, but a private testing system with a parent company in the US.
No wonder those suffering under heavier new restrictions in the north are angry.
The rules are impossible to follow and few can trust a Prime Minister who gets it wrong all the time. Not least when it comes to understanding the rules himself.
Nowhere is that sense of failure more justified than in the scandalous and ongoing experience of care homes, so many of which risk going to the wall.
As a Prime Minister, Boris Johnson just doesn’t work.
