David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)
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The living with the virus plan mentions numbers of 700 new staff for swabbing and 500 contact tracers. However, it does not give any benchmark or targets for turnaround times or how many tests should be carried out per week. Surely even for scrutiny purposes and also just to have a strategy, there should be a target of how many tests or, at least, what capacity we should have. The target in the past was 100,000 tests per week. The Minister for Health said last week that he sought an options paper from Mr. Reid on expanding that figure as 100,000 was not enough. Why did the plan not include targets for how many tests should be carried out per week and for the end-to-end turnaround time?