Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 23 September 2020

Special Committee on Covid-19 Response

Covid-19: Strategic Options for Government Plan to Eliminate Community Transmission

Dr. Tomás Ryan:

It depends on what degree of specificity and sensitivity one is willing to tolerate. When one is doing travel testing, it is not diagnostics, it is screening. Regarding commercially available systems, the main limiting factor is availability of kits and whether one can set up enough for it to be feasible and sustainable. That is rapidly moving, which is why I suggested earlier that we need to incentivise the manufacturing of this type of technology in Ireland.