Dr. Kirsten Schaffer:

I can answer the question on saliva. Data have been published that show that testing can be performed on saliva as well and that is quite sensitive. The limiting factor with saliva might be that a significant amount of saliva might need to be produced to be tested. The recommendations in the papers that have been published so far are that it should be done early in the morning, that a person should not have brushed his or her teeth or eaten, and that the person should produce a certain amount of saliva. If all of that is managed, it can be fairly equivalent to testing on a nasopharyngeal swab.

To comment on what Dr. McConkey said, I agree there is no one step or measure we can take and it is worrying that the trend is upward. We are all afraid that the number of steps will go up again as well but we have to become more detailed on what interventions are important. When one sees videos on social media of house parties of more than 50 people that take place for a couple of hours before the Garda comes in the end to try to disperse it, that is a big issue because these are high-risk situations for a significant spread of Covid-19, especially considering the fact that we do not even collect the data of those involved. That means we will not have the data collected on the source of an outbreak from such an event. We need to look more closely at how we can carry out more refined interventions to try to prevent transmission.