‘We were caught off guard on tests’ – Eamon Ryan
TRANSPORT Minister Eamon Ryan has admitted that some of the Government’s controversial new anti-Covid measures are contradictory.
The Green Party leader has also said that the testing and tracing system was ‘caught off guard’ during the recent surge in the virus.
Mr Ryan said the system was not prepared to rapidly scale up in response to recent outbreaks.
He told RTÉ’s Today With Sarah McInerney: ‘The system was not responsive quick enough in the rapid scaling up. What we are committing to do is to say, “That’s not good enough”, we have to get our testing times down and each of us in our Government roles have to say, “We will do this”.’
The minister said the problem is the responsibility of the ‘entire political administrative system’, and that the Government acknowledges turnaround times for testing and contact tracing are ‘not good enough’.
One of the difficulties, he said, was getting the necessary numbers of public health officials to do contact tracing. ‘We have to learn from that and make sure it doesn’t happen again,’ he said.
Mr Ryan confessed he could see the contradiction in the advice – delivered by himself, Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Health Minister Stephen Donnelly on Tuesday – that only six people can gather indoors, but that schools could have indoor classes of 20 to 30 pupils and 50 people could attend a wedding.
He said ‘all of this is about risk assessment’, and the Government view is that schools reopening is essential.
However, Sinn Féin’s Louise O’Reilly criticised the minister’s response about testing, asking how he could have been ‘caught off guard’ when several hundred people were ‘screaming’ that testing was absolutely essential.
And Dr Nuala O’Connor, the lead Covid-19 adviser at the Irish College of General Practitioners, said GPs have noticed a delay when they refer patients for testing. She said the testing and tracing system has gone a ‘bit backwards in terms of responsiveness’.
The GP told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland: ‘A couple of weeks ago, virtually everywhere around the country, the patient had the appointment within 24 hours; now it is going out to maybe 48 hours, perhaps, maybe even a little bit longer. The time taken from when they present to the GP with symptoms to getting the test and getting the result of that
‘A huge increase in testing’
test has obviously extended. It is not universal across the country but it is certainly causing problems.
‘The Irish College of General Practitioners is concerned about the recent delays but we have been assured by the HSE that they are ramping everything up to try and to get on top of this.’
According to Dr O’Connor, there has been a 200% increase in GP referrals and close-contact testing in the past five or six weeks.
‘There has been a huge increase in testing. It does take a little time to get all of the elements that are required for testing ramped back up to full capacity. If we are still at this stage next week, I will be even more concerned,’ she said.
Ms O’Reilly said the Government should not have allowed the main weapon in the fight against limiting the spread of coronavirus to slip.
She said: ‘Minister Ryan might say they were caught off guard. I don’t know how you could be caught off guard when you had several hundreds, if not thousands, of people screaming at you that testing was absolutely essential.
‘Test, trace and isolate – how many times have they said it? How could they not know at this stage? Test, trace and isolate is absolutely essential.’ She added that the public were told the HSE has the capacity to test 15,000 people per day, but that capacity has never been utilised fully.
According to the HSE, in the week of August 10 to 16, more than 50,000 tests were conducted and results were issued. It said the turnaround time from testing to completion of the contact-tracing process is approximately 2.83 days.
‘What we would like to see is the Government being proactive about testing... Going into areas, not waiting for there to be a spike or waiting for there to be an issue, but proactively going in and community testing,’ said Ms O’Reilly. ‘They should be doing it in hospitals, they should be doing this in areas of high risk like Direct Provision centres, they should be doing this in factories where close contact is inevitable.’
To date, some 735,000 coronavirus tests have been conducted here.
According to the HSE, the current lab testing capacity is 92,000 per week – down from the 100,000 per week it achieved in May. ‘The option to extend this back up to 100,000 per week can be activated within a number of days,’ it confirmed.
‘They should be doing it in hospitals’