Professor Cillian Twomey:

To follow up on what Professor Kelleher has just said, an obvious question to ask is whether it is likely or possible that the transfers that occurred from acute hospital settings to nursing homes in the month of February, predominantly, brought Covid-19 to the settings to which they were transferred. The short answer is that we are unable to say with certainty that they did or did not. That relates partly to the way in which data are accumulated and collected but the more likely explanation is multifactorial. It relates to staff working in residential care settings, some of whom were working in several settings at the same time, and residing in congregated settings. The possibility of staff transmission, therefore, is equally an important factor.

We have made a seriously strong recommendation with regard to data collection in order that in future, if the question is asked whether people who transferred from physician or hospital A to facility B had a higher of lower incidence of Covid, we will be able to answer that. We were not able to get that answer in the work that we had done. It is more likely that it was related to staff although much less, I suspect, visitors but that is another area in which potentially there might have been some transmission. There are deficiencies in the way in which data are collated as between the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, HPSC, HIQA data and mortality data. It needs to be tightened and we have made clear recommendations as to how that should be done as a matter of immediate urgency. That has been accepted by the various agencies concerned as something that should be done.