Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

NPHET and the medical experts are very wary about doing randomised or other testing. Everyone has spoken about the importance of NPHET advice and it believes that there are many complications around this which could create issues for the contact tracing and isolation system within the country. It is very easy to say that we should do this or that. We have examined these issues and continue to examine them. It is important to say again that the focus now is on the health capacity. With the winter flu in particular coming our way, great work is being done within the Health Service Executive on capacity issues, as they relate to staff, physical capacity, ICU and the acute hospital system, and on the flu vaccination programme.

I visited the HSE on the Friday before last with the express purpose of speaking to people there about the prioritisation of the winter initiative right now so that we will be in a position to have the capacity to deal with whatever comes our way in the autumn, particularly within our hospital settings.

It must also be acknowledged that front-line healthcare workers have been key to dealing with the virus. The Deputy spoke about Siobhán Murphy. I did not hear her testimony, other than a small part of it on the news on the way in. This is a terrible, dangerous and deadly virus. We have to do everything we possibly can to prevent people from getting it. We cannot understate its impact on individuals' health. People can have it for a long time, they can be debilitated and it can create issues for their long-term health. That is why we need to continue to maintain our current behaviour in terms of social distancing and respiratory etiquette. Those are the essentials that will keep this virus down. People congregating indoors in large numbers has been a significant factor in the increase in numbers over the past two weeks. Those are important issues that we need to address and keep working on in order to ensure that we can keep down the spread of the virus by practising the kinds of behaviour to which I refer. I am under no illusions about how dangerous this virus is to the health of any individual and to all of us in general. That is why we have to do everything we possibly can to keep it low.

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