TESTING LEVELS RUNNING AT JUST ONE-FIFTH OF THE AMOUNT PLEDGED

ONLY 3,000 Covid-19 tests were carried out to reveal all of Monday’s newly confirmed cases of 88, the Chief Medical Officer has said. The figure is far from the 15,000-a-day tests needed to achieve the promised weekly 100,000 target. The co-leader of the Social Democrats, Roísín Shortall, grilled Dr Tony Holohan on the testing numbers during the Special Covid-19 Response Committee when he admitted to the shortcoming, Dr Holohan said: ‘Yes, we are not testing at the scale of 15,000-a-day at the moment. We know that we are not.’ The Social Democrat TD deduced that a low level of tests were carried out by working out the number of tests carried out through the 3% positive diagnosis. Dr Holohan attributed the drop in testing to fallout from the weekend and reassured Ms Shortall that the NPHET will be refocusing their ‘priorities’. He told the Dáil committee: ‘One of the things that will help in our understanding of the community transmission will be the decision we have taken to introduce this week, along with the

‘There’s a fixation on 100,000 tests’

easing of restrictions, the testing of close contacts of cases, which many other countries are not doing.

‘That will add significantly to our understanding of community transmission and asymptomatic transmission and give us a much greater response, as it were, in terms of our handling of that.’

Jim Breslin told the special Covid-19 Oireachtas committee that the target turnaround time is three days for 70% of all tests.

He said one of the ways to achieve that is by texting negative results, which he said would ‘really speed things up’.

‘But we do want to continue to improve those, and what we have is a system which was patched together, but now needs to be redesigned,’ Mr Breslin added.

‘The HSE is doing that, working on information systems and processing systems to get that down as real time as possible.’ Dr Holohan said that the HSE is at the capacity of carrying out 100,000 tests a week and that 97% of people who were tested were receiving negative results.

He added: ‘Our assessment is that we believe it is needed. It’s not the only target that is important. It’s also the test turnaround.

‘There is a fixation on 100,000 tests but it needs to be fluid.’

Asked how many members are currently on the NPHET team, Dr Holohan said that it has grown with the State’s needs.

‘We co-opted people along the way,’ he added.

Dr Holohan was urged to publish updated minutes of NPHET’s meeting.

‘The challenge of keeping up to date with the administrative tasks is significant,’ Dr Holohan added.

Sinn Féin’s Louise O’Reilly asked if people who are returning to work as part of phase one will be tested for the virus.

‘It has struck me that some of the measures have been reactive rather than proactive and in this time I would have thought that you would have used the time on pause to make preparations for reopening the economy,’ she added.

Dr Holohan said: ‘Any decision in relation to testing and its role in a particular occupational setting will be taken on a public health assessment at a point in time if that’s something that’s... worth doing.

‘But it won’t necessarily be the case that particular occupational groups will be subject to a sweep of testing, unless there’s a public health rationale.

‘That might arise at a point in time,’ he added.