Mid-Career Change to Data Science - how easy is it to get into this industry and what effort is needed if I am a newbie in programming and data analytics?

Can't say for Data Science specifically, but for programming and software engineering - deffinitely a very lucrative field and in-demand globally. My advice is to dip your toes first into programming with Python - it's a cool and easy language to pick up. You'll then know if programming is for you or not. It's often easy to look at the salary figures above your own personal enjoyment of working in the field. All successful software engineers I know are the way they are because they love software and honing their craft.

I would say give it a few months of consistent incremental effort to familiarize with the language's fundamentals and data science libraries (like Scikit-Learn, NumPy, Pandas and so on). You should also consider working on some problem sets as you go along. Do also network around if you're looking to jump straight into job hunting after. AFAIK, boot camps give you great connections into the industry right off the bat (although its effectiveness in teaching the core principles is debatable).

As a bonus, I'd recommend checking out Kaggle for an onine repository of datasets that you can play around with. They also hold competitions where you can win cash prices based on modelling criteria, although that's more to machine learning stuff. When in doubt, tutorials are always readily available online.

All great things takes time and effort but the only eay to start is well... to get started! Whether or not it's easy to achieve is entirely up to your drive. Good luck!