Dr. Sharon McGuinness:

The authority has two systems in place. One comprises the reporting regulations from the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application)(Amendment)(No.2) Regulations 2016. This deals with the reporting of accidents and incidents to the authority. The other one is the reporting under the Safety Health and Welfare at Work (Biological Agents) Regulations 2013, amended in 2020 to include the virus SARS-CoV-2. It is specific to Covid-19 because it requires reporting by the employer to the authority where there is occupational exposure and it is attributable to the individual worker who has contracted Covid-19.

There is also separately the public health system. Covid is an occupational issue and is ultimately a global public health pandemic. The driver for Covid comes under the public health infectious disease regulations, which have been amended to require the reporting of Covid as an infectious disease. Every time somebody gets tested, that detail is put into the computerised system, CIDR, established and run by Health Protection Surveillance Centre. Those are the data everybody sees daily and weekly with facts and numbers. The information in that database comes from the public health medical side. Everybody who has a positive PCR test would be reported to that system.

We get that directly from the HPSC every week.

The HPSC updates the information up to the previous weekend, and we get it every Tuesday meaning that it is live and realistic. There is also other reporting. We are a member of the national standing oversight committee on high-risk sectors, which include construction, meat processing and food manufacturing as well as some other manufacturing plants. A number of employer groups and ICTU are also members of that committee. We get data from it on particular cases in those workplaces.

The third system I mentioned was the national incident management system, NIMS, which was set up by the State Claims Agency. It is effectively a system for the public healthcare system to report incidents. We have access to those data if and as required in that context.