I think you might be surprised. The government knows that this is the silver bullet they need to rescue the economy from oblivion.
I’m expecting that once this thing is ready there’ll be a logistical effort for the history books to roll it out. See what they can do with the military involved, like the nightingales.
Sad to say, given how testing, lockdown, etc. has proceeded, I'm losing confidence that most western governments are capable of any "logistical efforts for the history books" at this point.
I heard a lot of bluster about testing here in Ontario in the spring, but here we are in the fall with rationing of tests again.
I suspect the government will magically be much better at logistical efforts when there's a clear economic pay-off. Neoliberalism might not be great when it comes to helping the little man, but I suspect it can swiftly get its act together when it comes to a short-term solution to economic malaise.
For what it's worth, our testing has steadily increased since then. Perhaps we ought to expect more than "steadily", but the recent rationing is more to do with dramatic uptick in demand for tests (schools reopening, immediately followed by Thanksgiving) than with a change in capacity.
Testing in Waterloo Region was really good over the summer— minimal wait times, multiple drive-in sites, results turned around in 24-36hrs. I think they just failed to account for the bump that would come from school starting and people wanting to get tested in advance of Thanksgiving.
I think the "military involved" piece is key, especially if you're talking about the US. It's maybe a bit trite at this point, but a lot of comparisons were made about the stark contrast in how quickly a national response mobilized in response to BLM protests vs the pandemic. The basic takeaway being: executive priorities matter, and even Trump has made it clear on a number of occasions that getting the vaccine out is important to him.
I guess that's the thing; the gov't is the one who made the decision to bring kids back fulltime, how incompetent do you have to be to not know there'd be a bump in testing demands?
Re: Waterloo region, I work at Google Waterloo, so although I don't live in KW (I'm in rural Flamborough) most of my coworkers do. I had one who showed up at 7am to get a test, lineups were around several blocks and they shut the whole thing down because people were getting rude. He then had to wait a bit and drive to Guelph. People were driving out from Toronto to London, Woodstock, etc. to get tests.
In our industry if we provisioned data centres or server instances like this, we'd be in a bit of trouble, no?
EDIT: FWIW I have a political leaning and bias towards a strong public sector and am a big believer in public service. I'm not one of those "government can't do anything right" and "less government is better" types. But I do think that several decades of "government can't do anything right" people being a dominant cultural and political force now means that government can no longer do anything right. We're losing our ability to act collectively :-(
I like Horwath but I think her admin would have faced insurmountable ideological opposition, the same way Rae did. And then the whole COVID response would have been framed in those terms, as a right-left politicization like it is in the US. At least now, with a right wing government administrating the COVID response, only the far lunatic right (cough Randy Hillier cough) has politicized it. For conservatives, it's "their guy" delivering the tough medicine, and they just blame Trudeau for anything they don't like, even things the feds have nothing to do with. While it hasn't been great the management of this situation is not _nearly_ as bad as it could be. Just look at Jason Kenney's gov't.
I’m expecting that once this thing is ready there’ll be a logistical effort for the history books to roll it out. See what they can do with the military involved, like the nightingales.