Eoghan Murphy
Question:591. Deputy Eoghan Murphy asked the Minister for Health the testing capacity he expects to be in place for when a Covid-19 vaccine is available. [41220/20]
View answerTuesday, 8 December 2020
Questions (591)
Written answers
Testing and contact tracing is a key component of the Government’s and the country’s response to the pandemic. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have pursued a robust testing and contact tracing strategy to combat the spread of Covid-19. The HSE worked intensively to put in place a comprehensive, reliable and responsive testing and tracing operation in a very short timeframe.
We continue to build agility in our system to meet the increasing community demand, examples of this include the outlined nationwide recruitment campaign for swabbers and contact tracers, standing up temporary swabbing sites and making process improvements to our end to end test and trace system. The current resource model has been stress tested at higher activity levels and can respond quickly to changes in demand.
The total workforce now includes circa 736 staff working in tracing and circa 976 working in swabbing. Recruitment in testing and contact tracing will continue until the targets of dedicated staff of 800 in contact tracing and 1,000 in swabbing are met. This will also allow remaining redeployed staff to return to their substantive roles.
We now have on-island capacity to test up to 126,000 people per week, which can be increased to 140,000 per week by utilising available surge capacity. Testing and tracing and the public health advice relating to Covid-19 is kept under continuing review by the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET).