Dr. Colm Henry:

Testing is used in a couple of ways. First, people may conform to the case definition because community transmission has fallen so much. It has fallen to very low levels in terms of demand. Second, it can be used to support specific strategies guided by public health. This could be in the context of outbreaks, which have also fallen because of the fall in rates of community transmission. Third, testing can be used for specific strategies to inform us of the behaviour of the virus among healthcare workers in nursing homes or to inform a strategy that we have just developed and passed through NPHET, which is a broader strategy of how we use our testing capacity to test healthcare workers in different settings to inform us about how it behaves and how it is transmitted among this population, as I said earlier. Much of the capacity at the moment is, thankfully, unused but we need the capacity for any surges which, as Professor Mallon said, are more likely than not to appear in the coming autumn-winter season.