“On December 21, President Joe Biden pulled an Oprah—antigen-style. He was touting the January launch of a website where every family in the country would be able to apply to receive four free rapid at-home Covid tests. While the announcement was an embarrassing turnaround from the day his press secretary Jen Psaki mocked the very idea of gifting the American people with those vital tests, the move was quickly lauded; millions of Americans were frustrated at their inability to score these at their local drugstores. They were also miffed at the cost, which sometimes bordered on price gouging…”
“But these days, a relatively new government unit, the United States Digital Service, is in place. Its new administrator, Mina Hsiang, actually served on the small team that rescued healthcare.gov for Obama. That site’s meltdown—it typically crashed before a user could even do anything—exposed a long history of government haplessness. Locked into antediluvian IT protocols and a contracting system void of accountability, government tech’s default was usually failure. The USDS was formed in August 2014 to address that overall problem and apply the modern principles used to fix healthcare.gov. During the pandemic, the USDS became even more important, as citizens accessed more services online. Although Hsiang had left for private industry in 2018, ‘Coming back was a no-brainer,’ she says via email…”
“The whole project, from conception to a soft rollout on January 18 (a day earlier than announced), was completed in three weeks. The website itself was built by a relatively tiny team: three from USDS and around 15 in the Postal Service, a dramatic contrast to the human waves the government used to marshal on such projects. And it worked—a conclusion verified by the lack of outrage at its performance. Outside analytics indicate that more than 68 million people visited the site during its first week. Even more striking, at one point on the 18th, the site was handling 700,000 visitors at the same instant. By a large margin, this exceeded all traffic on other government sites combined. Best of all: The government now says that approximately 60 million people ordered tests…” Read the full article here.
Source: Why the Free Covid Test Website Wasn’t a Dumpster Fire – By Steven Levy, January 28, 2022. Wired.
