Matt Hancock marks his own homework

[shewhomust]

First, Matt Hancock sets himself a task:

100,000 tests a day by the end of April

Then he marks it correct:

he announces that he has indeed hit his target.

He gives himself a mark of 120%,

announcing that there had been 122,347 tests in the final 24 hours of the month.

Now he tells us what the target actually meant:

This wasn't about tests actually carried out, oh, no, let alone people given the results of the tests. The target had been reached by counting tests issued ("It's in the post!")

But that's all right because ...

the purpose of setting that target was not actually that the figure of 100,000 has any importance in itself. Matt Hancock is not the first person to point this out. He may, as has been suggested, have plucked the figure out of thin air, which is fine, because it served to set an ambitious goal which has been met. As durham_rambler often remarks, what gets measured gets done.

Well done, Matt!

Of course, if you accept this reasoning, it would be all right to admit that you hadn't met that ambitious target, as long as it encouraged you to do better than you otherwise would have done.

And as long as aiming for the magic number of 100,000 tests hasn't distracted anyone from making tests (and results) more accessible to people who need them, or acting on results to trace routes of transmission, or ...