Dr. Tomás Ryan:

If I could just come in on mass testing, I agree that we cannot expect our current test-trace-isolation infrastructure to meet that type of goal, but the idea of testing everyone in the population was originally promoted on an international basis by Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize winner for economics. It was proposed to the Cabinet in April by the Chief Scientific Adviser in Ireland, Professor Mark Ferguson, that using conventional technology with pooled testing, we could test everyone in Ireland every two weeks as a way of getting the pandemic under control. Is that possible? It is a huge logistical undertaking, and it is not diagnostics, it is screening, so there are different issues with false positives. False positives would be a cost of this type of approach, but it would be a liveable cost.

It would require a huge degree of effort and the buy-in and use of the Department of Defence and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, because it would require a lot of labs, a lot of people doing the footwork, and courier work to do with delivering saliva samples, etc. This has been trialled in the UK in particular cities, and it has shown that it can work from a logistical perspective. In Denmark, they tested everyone in the Faroe Islands repeatedly, which is a population of around 50,000 people, and now the Faroe Islands has zero Covid. In a population such as that of Ireland, testing everyone is something that perhaps we should be looking at, but obviously it will become less intimidating from a logistical perspective as new, more rapid and cheaper testing technology comes online.