Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On tracing the short answer is "Yes". The HSE informs me it now has capability in place to contact trace up to 1,500 new cases per day within a 24-hour period. On the basis that yesterday we had just north of 300 new cases - and hopefully the current measures will continue to have an effect - right now the HSE has the capacity it needs. What I want to focus on though, is not just the volume and the speed but the depth of that contact tracing. The HSE is focused on that as well. The experts call it forward contact tracing and backward contact tracing and it involves getting to close contacts and close contacts of those close contacts.

The HSE now has very significant capacity in place and is still scaling up. It has gone from 231 contact tracers in mid-September and is scaling up to 800. New IT systems are being brought on board. At the same time, the seconded staff, many of whom were allied health professionals, are being redeployed to their roles as well so,= a lot of good things are happening.

In my view, the focus has got to be, as we come out of level 5, to have the most responsive comprehensive contact tracing system that can move really quickly but go in depth and, essentially, isolate the new cases as well as possible when they arise.