Professor Paddy Mallon:

We are talking about contact tracing and testing today and we have underlined how vital a component that is. Moving forward towards the early autumn, our hospital settings will be critical. People in Ireland will expect to be able to attend a clinical care facility and to be treated in a safe environment and it is paramount that we maintain safety within our hospitals and prevent Covid-19 infection from entering the hospitals. The two main ways Covid-19 will enter hospitals will be through patients attending hospitals through the emergency department or through outpatient clinics with symptoms - so we need to pick people up at that stage - and staff attending the hospital unwittingly bringing the infection in. These are lessons we have learned from the first wave.

In my view at the moment, we do not have a clear process in place to be able to at least deal with the staff issue. That is part of the idea around the need for this written end-to-end testing strategy. As we retreat rapidly from our use of private hospitals, there is an expectation that we will all be able to squeeze back into the same healthcare footprint we had back in March, be able to deliver the same services in a safe manner. I cannot see those expectations being realistic. We have emergency departments where the footprint is far too small; we had a trolley crisis that went on for months on end up until March when we had in excess of 900 people on trolleys on some days and where we are unable to physically distance. Even with the adequate testing and turnaround in hospitals, the current environment within a lot of our hospitals is simply not adequate to be able to safely manage increasing community transmission of this infection. We have a window to fix that but that window will only be open between now and September because it is at that stage that I expect cases to increase.