I was hired for a particular engagement with Microsoft years ago by a similar firm. Microsoft needed x, the firm had nobody so they put out an urgent call and passed me off like I was one of their long-time employees.

I think it’s safe to say nobody has a bench of 146 people ready to go at a moment’s notice.

And with all that said, companies like Deloitte do have hundreds of people ready to go. They may not have a deep bench for certain niche projects, but I used to work at a Big4 and for something generic like "build us a website for people to sign up", we had entire offices of people around the globe in our offshore delivery centers just waiting around for work like that. Oftentimes we would still subcontract because it works out to be cheaper if 10-20% of your resources on any given project are subcontractors, but they weren't always necessary.

There are lots of great people who would rather be doing something meaningful than whatever they’re currently doing and governments need to do better at tapping into this.

It’s a different problem, but for a more recent example, look at how fast vaccinateca.com got going.

Isn't the whole article about how they failed to mobilize quickly?

With that said, the start of the pandemic was ~1 year ago. Even if it started right then, 12 months for a country-wide, government-run IT project is a rush job.

A lot of the debate about pandemic management boils down to criticisms of, "did it wrong," without saying what would tip the threshold in the other direction.

This is problematic because it inspires a lot of talking past one another, resentment, and miscommunication. Ultimately it turns into a churn of frustration, defensiveness, and offense.

But even if you manage to get a response to agree on what, "right," means, the depth of their example is likely shallow. (e.g. "Such and such had only 12 infections because they such and such.")

This, too, is problematic, because it presupposes a ton of equivalent variables between the two countries. Population demographics, geographic structure, legal structure, culture, economic stratification, etc.

Conflation between a, "did it right," and a, "did it wrong," country is practically impossible, at least in the context of pandemic response. And anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is either ignorant, lazy, or obtuse.

If you get a satisfactory answer to your query, I'll move to the moon.

(I'm not taking the dismissive 'this is easy' side of the argument here, but the project failed, the lessons learned need to start there, not with the terms of the contract)