> I believe Cummings was disappointed that this 'data system' wasn't available before the pandemic, precisely because that few week delay putting one together meant everything.
It's very easy to say that something should have been there after the fact, and harder to build a system for an unknown-threat before you have any clear requirements.
It's also not clear to me what data a 'data system' would have provided that would have meaningfully changed any policy (and if it didn't affect policy, I'm not sure how it can 'mean everything').
What data did the government not have in March 2020 that they could have collected with some sort of pre-built 'data system'? In reality the bigger issue in understanding the situation at the time was that we couldn't identify all the covid cases anyway because there wasn't enough test resource - it wasn't the lack of a 'data system'.
