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:

I will give a brief answer. I am conscious that Dr. Giesecke has been extremely courteous and he is coming in from Sweden. He has had his hand up for some time. As I noted earlier, testing works for public health but we need to move to a find, test, trace, isolate system rather than test, trace, isolate. We need to aggressively seek out second and third degree contacts if our testing is to suppress the virus in the population. We also need to test vulnerable populations. We need sentinel pool testing in places such as schools and we definitely need airport testing. Then we need a framework for potentially setting up mass testing. They are all very different things. One cannot expect the same lab to be doing all these things; there has to be a framework that focuses on them in a consistent way.