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. Samuel McConkey:

The ribonucleic acid is in a stabilising medium and will be relatively stable. In my view, delay in the processing is not so much a problem with degradation of the sample. The problem is that we are not doing contact tracing and isolation of the contacts. We fail completely to use that test properly if we have a couple of days of delay.