Dr. Cillian De Gascun:

It is a really good question. A significant amount of work has been done in this area. I appreciate that, in many respects, it probably seems straightforward to test all healthcare workers. The challenge is that negative results, that is, virus not detected results, at a single point in time do not give us a huge amount of information. We are very concerned about healthcare workers because they have accounted for 30% or more of all the cases we have seen. They are on the front line. Obviously, we had challenges in the early days from a PPE perspective. It is really important that we look after our front-line healthcare workers.

Part of the reason our proportion is so high is because they were always prioritised for testing, even when we had testing challenges with global supply chain issues in the early stages. The actual prevalence of infection in healthcare workers now is very low. We want to try to ensure we put in place a surveillance system that targets those healthcare workers who are at greatest risk so we can identify pockets of infection early on and contain them rather than doing mass testing. The problem with a mass testing approach as the prevalence becomes very low is that we may start to generate incorrect false positive results. We need to be careful about how we use the testing capacity we have.