> “je vraagt je af of het wel nodig was om de universiteiten in te schakelen, terwijl de privé-laboratoria het ook hadden aangekund.”
Achteraf is het altijd mooi wonen. Snap niet echt wat het nut is van dit soort opmerkingen te maken, buiten weer de zwarte piet door te schuiven.
So if I’m understanding correctly,
Gov gives money to uni labs so they can run more tests if private labs can’t handle all of them. It turns out private labs can handle most of the tests and the uni labs barely had to run any tests. Gov is now mad at the uni labs?
I really don’t see the issue here. An investment was made based on limited information. Turns out it was the wrong choice, why be mad at the thing you invested in?
Worked in a private lab service provider that changed their scope to help develop and maintain the PCR testing capacity/strategy as part of the government consortium.
Firstly, this type of emergency pandemic testing strategy is lucrative as fuck for a lab. While my ex-company volunteered to help fight the COVID crisis out of scientific good-Will, they wouldnt have done so if it also meant breaking the bank. However lucrative, the sheer vastness of the endeavour was incredible.
At the height of our capacity, we were able to do 10k tests/day (normal operating capacity would be somewhere around 2-3K). Scaling up your operating capacity, training new people, increase in infrastructure, tons of lab consumables during a global crisis, etc, costs tons of money for companies. Hence the governments willingness to pay royally for your commitment to even do this.
However, due to the ever-changing priorities/testing strategy (up and down, shut it down, restart, etc), on some days, you have a surplus of technicians, data analysts and support staff. Since you want to maintain the capacity at all costs (gov being fickle), these people are kept on the payroll and come to work. On slow days, they don’t perform qPCR tests for COVID, they do general tasks, research or strictly company stuff. Guess that’s the price the gov will pay for being on call “24/7”.
After a while though, the high throughput, full time availability of the private sector wasn’t needed anymore (between waves, summer, lockdown) and they started to scale things down again. However, the focus was not put on maintaining the private sector labs but to make a shift towards the “clinical” labs discussed in the article because they had the experience to deal with these kinds of tests (hah!).
Due to the shift, these labs now perform the COVID testing, they are limited in overall capacity (hence the 2k samples) but capable. As I already pointed out, being “on call” for “emergency testing and upscaling” does have a cost and I’m not surprised at all that the overall cost is this high.
Tinfoil hat on or off for this statement, you decide, these labs are coincidentally mostly run by the very same professors/experts you see on TV and there was and has been much debate whether the switch to “clinical” labs was necessary/useful besides being costly.
From my viewpoint is was wasteful at the very least and the communicated reasoning (to some of the private sector) for switching was questionable at best.
Wall of text over! If you have any extra questions, feel free to ask
It’s hilarious to read “oppositiepartij nva” while they have been part of so many gouvernments over the passed few years.
Yet they keep finding a way to play the victim or playing the part of daring opposition.
Er is letterlijk overal met geld gesmeten. Als ze alles gaan beginnen controleren, zeker in de ‘privé’ gaan er lijken bij de vleet uit de kast vallen…
Let’s look at the facts here.
A system was hastily set up to ensure we had the ability to quickly test on a massive scale. Back then, it was completely reasonable that we did this because test and trace seemed like the way to beat the virus.
We did not end up needing it due to the massive success of the vaccines and, honestly, the mask mandate, distance rules and the closing of various public places and businesses.
But imagine if we had needed it?
Can you imagine the uproar if it turns out we did need it but had not set it up because of budget issues? We would have been talking about human lives lost due to penny pinching.
This was just a logical thing to do considering the precautionary principle.
And, it is equally logical to realise that we are not going to need it and put a stop to it now.
Did some companies and institutions make a lot of money? Yes. But had we needed it, it would have seemed like the most sensible investment ever to make.
It’s like buying a great insurance and then lamenting that your house never burned down.
6 comments
> “je vraagt je af of het wel nodig was om de universiteiten in te schakelen, terwijl de privé-laboratoria het ook hadden aangekund.”
Achteraf is het altijd mooi wonen. Snap niet echt wat het nut is van dit soort opmerkingen te maken, buiten weer de zwarte piet door te schuiven.
So if I’m understanding correctly,
Gov gives money to uni labs so they can run more tests if private labs can’t handle all of them. It turns out private labs can handle most of the tests and the uni labs barely had to run any tests. Gov is now mad at the uni labs?
I really don’t see the issue here. An investment was made based on limited information. Turns out it was the wrong choice, why be mad at the thing you invested in?
Worked in a private lab service provider that changed their scope to help develop and maintain the PCR testing capacity/strategy as part of the government consortium.
Firstly, this type of emergency pandemic testing strategy is lucrative as fuck for a lab. While my ex-company volunteered to help fight the COVID crisis out of scientific good-Will, they wouldnt have done so if it also meant breaking the bank. However lucrative, the sheer vastness of the endeavour was incredible.
At the height of our capacity, we were able to do 10k tests/day (normal operating capacity would be somewhere around 2-3K). Scaling up your operating capacity, training new people, increase in infrastructure, tons of lab consumables during a global crisis, etc, costs tons of money for companies. Hence the governments willingness to pay royally for your commitment to even do this.
However, due to the ever-changing priorities/testing strategy (up and down, shut it down, restart, etc), on some days, you have a surplus of technicians, data analysts and support staff. Since you want to maintain the capacity at all costs (gov being fickle), these people are kept on the payroll and come to work. On slow days, they don’t perform qPCR tests for COVID, they do general tasks, research or strictly company stuff. Guess that’s the price the gov will pay for being on call “24/7”.
After a while though, the high throughput, full time availability of the private sector wasn’t needed anymore (between waves, summer, lockdown) and they started to scale things down again. However, the focus was not put on maintaining the private sector labs but to make a shift towards the “clinical” labs discussed in the article because they had the experience to deal with these kinds of tests (hah!).
Due to the shift, these labs now perform the COVID testing, they are limited in overall capacity (hence the 2k samples) but capable. As I already pointed out, being “on call” for “emergency testing and upscaling” does have a cost and I’m not surprised at all that the overall cost is this high.
Tinfoil hat on or off for this statement, you decide, these labs are coincidentally mostly run by the very same professors/experts you see on TV and there was and has been much debate whether the switch to “clinical” labs was necessary/useful besides being costly.
From my viewpoint is was wasteful at the very least and the communicated reasoning (to some of the private sector) for switching was questionable at best.
Wall of text over! If you have any extra questions, feel free to ask
It’s hilarious to read “oppositiepartij nva” while they have been part of so many gouvernments over the passed few years.
Yet they keep finding a way to play the victim or playing the part of daring opposition.
Er is letterlijk overal met geld gesmeten. Als ze alles gaan beginnen controleren, zeker in de ‘privé’ gaan er lijken bij de vleet uit de kast vallen…
Let’s look at the facts here.
A system was hastily set up to ensure we had the ability to quickly test on a massive scale. Back then, it was completely reasonable that we did this because test and trace seemed like the way to beat the virus.
We did not end up needing it due to the massive success of the vaccines and, honestly, the mask mandate, distance rules and the closing of various public places and businesses.
But imagine if we had needed it?
Can you imagine the uproar if it turns out we did need it but had not set it up because of budget issues? We would have been talking about human lives lost due to penny pinching.
This was just a logical thing to do considering the precautionary principle.
And, it is equally logical to realise that we are not going to need it and put a stop to it now.
Did some companies and institutions make a lot of money? Yes. But had we needed it, it would have seemed like the most sensible investment ever to make.
It’s like buying a great insurance and then lamenting that your house never burned down.