German government is divided into a federal and state system, with some testing costs also being met by insurance.
The details are complex, but the German Federal Ministry of Health told us that for every one million tests the federal government incurs costs of up to €21 million. On 7 March 2021, Germany had conducted 46,252,735 tests. A very crude estimate would therefore suggest that this has cost the federal government roughly €972 million, or around £834 million.
This does not include any money spent by the federal states on running testing centres, nor anything spent so far on contact tracing. So although it is hard to say how much Germany as a whole has spent on testing and tracing - and therefore hard to compare it with the UK - we can be confident that the total cost in Germany was far more than £48m.
Why can they be confident that Germany has spent far more than £48m? Because its certain to have spent more than £834m!
I was actually nitpicking your statement, we don’t know that they’ve spent “much more” than £834m, just that they have probably spent more than that, with no indication of the likely magnitude.
Really? You said it made no reference to 834 million, when it clearly did.
That £834 million also didn’t include the infrastructure needed for testing, the staffing costs, nor any costs at all associated with the trace element of test and trace.
Safe to say that were those costs to be included it would come to much more than £834 million.
As I said, the premise of the original question was nonsense.
The figures I used originally were taken from the Full Fact article. You posted it without reading yourself then laughably accused others of not reading. You call people dense but are clearly blinded by your own arrogance (or ignorance).
I’ve just set myself the target of quitting drinking by 2030.
It’s brilliant because I don’t have to stop now, and actually I’m planning to double my alcohol intake over the next five years.
Of course I’ll need a last minute big push at the end of the decade and my liver will be absolute ribbons by then so it will probably be too late. But fuck it. That’s a problem for another day.
Tone it down pal. You ballsed up your argument by quoting the wrong figures from that link and then must have deleted your posts.
Try reading the link I posted from the public accounts committee (or any other report) and calmly explain how the UK ‘test and trace system is very good’
Someone is seriously going to have to explain to me how opening a new coal mine is ambitious to net zero. I really don’t get it and I’m highly sympathetic to mining given what they have provided to communities in the past.
My quibbling was to do with the fact that we know they probably spent more than £834m, given the associated costs and the uncertainty around the original estimate, but you have no grounds to claim that it was “much more” as per the first quote.
Considering that many people are questioning your numbers and your reasoning behind why the premise is nonsense, it is quite clear that either (a) we are too dense to appreciate your great enlightenment, or (b) you might just need to explain a little more.
The obvious answer is that it can’t be seen in isolation, there are wind, solar and hydro farms/plants also being brought online up and down the country. Plans for new nuclear power stations keep popping up. Older mines, oil Wells, gas fields may get taken offline.
Fwiw, I think there isn’t yet the commitment needed by the Government to achieve net zero and it will be left to future governments to do the heavy lifting.
As an elaboration, my personal interest in this is as follows: I think we can see that the testing system at least is/was quite robust relative to most other countries, certainly the numbers do bear that out. But in a sense, with the devotion of sufficient resources, that can be achieved by any country.
The question is, how do the costs compare between each country for the results actually achieved?
No, it’s only been £20b estimated as of April 2021, and the only thing we know is that it’s >£834m, but quite probably nowhere close to the UK’s figures.
The testing system quite clearly works, or did until recently when you could barely get lateral flow tests, while now the PCR test queue is clogged up.
(The first non-paywalled article I could find on test shortages).
The tracing system has been a complete, abject failure from the start. Anecdotally, I recently got pinged 6 days after I came into contact with someone who tested positive. This contact was at the supermarket, from someone I do not know. Considering the official advice was to self-isolate for 7 days after contact (if you haven’t been fully vaccinated), it would have been pretty much useless.