It’s my last day to day today with the Test and Trace team at the Department of Health and Social Care. The team – Caroline, Anthony, John and Terese – have been amazing to work with.

I’ve been here since December and the work has been hard – really hard at times – and as I come to the end of it, I’ve looked back at what the team I’ve worked with has achieved.

The numbers are incredible:

• Almost 500k people trained
• Over 4m resources downloaded
• 560k+ hours of training completed

As I’ve said before, these are meaningless metrics on their own though. What the team has done is develop materials that trained people in the community, the care sector, retail and education. Those people went on to identify some 125k+ people with Covid and prevented the further spread of the disease. This is from a team that had no experience in developing training and were drawn from a range of places, roles and experiences.

I don’t think there’s a better example of not worrying about the input and output data but want to understand outcome and insight.

Similarly, I don’t think there’s a better example of how a team, with a single focus, can work remotely, and produce at a level that would have been inconceivable a short time ago.