Dr. Samuel McConkey:

My view is that the current test, the PCR test, is very similar to what is used all over the world. We are looking for the nucleic acid, the RNA, of the virus. It is not that we are doing a different thing. It is quality controlled and done in triplicate. The National Virus Reference Laboratory and Dr. Cillian De Gascun have set up a very good test quickly and then spread it around Ireland. That is the best we have. To do better than that would require a viral culture to be done and we do not have a lot of technology to do that in Ireland.

To reassure the Deputy, when we did that in hospitals and nursing homes during the outbreaks and sent home the people who were positive, and their contacts, that did control the horrible infection outbreaks we had in Ireland back in March and April, so it is good enough to control it and it tells us who is shedding the RNA of the virus. Sometimes people have tiny amounts and it could be just dead skeletons or the bones of the virus that are not infectious. If there are tiny amounts it may not be infectious, but if there are large amounts, those people are infected and infectious. It can take three to five days for a test to show as positive, so if I am infected today it will not show up until it is incubated for a little while and then, typically, it lasts for seven to ten days. I feel it is all we have got and we have shown it is good enough.

As Dr. Schaffer mentioned, it is a challenge to get access to it for the right people very quickly and then to act on those results. I suggest it should all happen within 24 hours. When people identify with symptoms, they should call their GP, have a test scheduled, have the test run, which is only an hour or two, and then have the contact tracing done, whether it is through an app, by telephone calls or face to face on the local street. Then perhaps we could have a pop-up testing centre on the local street where all the neighbours and anyone the person has seen, such as the staff in the Spar shop where he or she bought that newspaper that morning, can all come and have their tests done within a day. We need a much quicker and more responsive system based at local level. That is what is going on in Germany, but I am open to correction from Dr. Schaffer on that. I think the PCR is the best we have.