MORE CASES ARE COMING AND TRACING ISN’T READY

MORE cases of Covid19 are inevitable as we lift lockdown, but we simply do not have the top-class testing and contact tracing system vital to ensure the disease does not get out of control.

As we lift the restrictions we are going to have a series of new cases – there were several today and there will be many more.

This will continue at a fairly steady level – it may even increase – because there will be more contacts between people and we will get little bunches of cases and if there is enough to get out of control.

Remember very few people in the country have been infected which means that the great majority of the people in the country are susceptible as they have no immunity.

That would include the vast majority of older people. The great majority of people over 70 have not been infected and so they remain as vulnerable as they were at the beginning – and the virus could take off again. This is the second surge that everyone is worried about.

In order to defeat that, to prevent that, you have to have absolutely top class testing and tracing abilities out through the ripples on the pond, not just the first case you identify but also their contacts.

Then amongst those contacts there’ll be some positives, seconddegree contacts. Then you will have their contacts, that’s thirddegree and fourth-degree contacts, and so on.

I simply do not believe that we have a system in place to deal with that sort of explosion and there’d be a whole series of miniexplosions. There is one example we know quite a lot about today, and that is the outbreaks in the meat processing plants. We know from a report yesterday that they were only able to contact 60% of the first-degree contacts of the people who tested positive.

That’s nowhere near enough to keep the virus under control. That may be an extreme case but nevertheless it’s an example of what will happen, and we’re now moving into a period where we are going to open up summer camps for children.

Just imagine that one child at a summer camp tests positive. Now you have 20 to 50 to 100 other children at the camp who are first degree contacts, and their families.

Do we have the capacity to contact 100 or 200 people connected with a single summer camp immediately, and test them? I don’t believe we do.

In the case of sports, I am absolutely in favour of opening up sports. It will help everybody to feel better with games on TV and so on.

It’ll brighten up everybody’s week and there’s no question there’s a way of doing it.

They could open up the GAA Championship by testing every single player, team official and the families and excluding those who are positive until they’ve quarantined. And not just testing once but every four or five days.

The GAA has the capacity to organise that and should, in my opinion, arrange for the tests to be provided commercially and then have the games played.

Of course that’s a massive testing exercise and the State does not have that testing capacity – so that would have to be done by the GAA. Likewise other sports could do the same and they would have essentially virus-free sport and it would be wonderful. But it does require really, really high-quality and high-intensity testing.

At the moment I think Government policy is constrained by the fact that testing and tracing on the scale I think we need is not available.

As far I can see there are no plans to raise the capacity of testing and tracing to the kind of level that we need, considering we want to open schools and universities in September.

I would have much greater confidence in the Government’s strategy if I had seen any significant commitment to a massive capacity for testing and tracing, which we ought to have available as an option in order to regulate incoming visitors to the country. But we don’t have the capacity.

We need to have an enormously powerful tracing and testing system which would allow all schools to open as if they were virus free.

It’s not clear to me anybody is prepared to make the massive decision that would be needed.

Consider the decision they took to essentially bring private hospitals into the public sphere, an absolutely massive decision costing several hundred million.

Whether it was good value or not, they took a huge decision and it did give us a feeling of confidence that we had more beds if needed.

We need a decision very similar to that – to establish really soon the kind of testing and tracing capacity that I think we need to address all of these different issues.