Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Remember when Matt Hancock of the government said that they would reach 100,000 tests a day on COVID 19 by the end of April? Well, the figure they gave on the last day - that deadline was last Thursday - was 122,347. So everyone was happy. Well, that figure is somewhat distorted. 100,000 tests were not done in a day They started to include home testing kits which were sent out on that day. Some were sent without return labels. Some may not be used. It is the epidemiological equivalence of "the cheque is in the post". In other words, they changed the number of tests completed midstream. In fact, 40,000 of which two-thirds were home kits and the rest to hospitals that requested them, were posted on that day. So roughly 82,000 tests were actually carried out.

In economics and policy studies there is a law called Goodheart's Law which states "Goodhart's law (an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart) is when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

One way in which this can occur is individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions that alter its outcome such as that with these tests. So imposing a target distorts the measure. Not too dissimilar to Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle. In its defence targets are goals to be met and without it, we would have not gotten this far. Massaging the figures like this though is not on.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000htw2