Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

News has just broken that the National Virus Reference Laboratory, NVRL, in University College Dublin has released the following urgent notification in relation to SARS-CoV-2 testing at NVRL:

Due to unavoidable staff shortages the VRL will not be able to provide any SARS-CoV-2 testing on the weekends of the 24th/25th and 26th October and the weekend of the 31st October/1st November 2020. Apologies for the late notice ...

That is serious. It is shocking. It seriously contributes to undermining the fight against Covid-19. Is that the responsibility of the people this Bill proposes to fine? No, it is the responsibility of the Government and its failure to recruit enough people to build up the testing capacity to the degree necessary to fight Covid-19. Similarly, if the infection rate is running riot, it has a great deal to do with the Government's failure during the summer to build up the tracing capacity for close contacts. The people who failed to do that are the people who are responsible for the situation we are in now, namely, the Government.

I will give another shocking example, which is also breaking news. Eight third-year student nurses on placements in Sligo were due to start in a nursing home on Monday. They had travelled from different counties and are sharing accommodation, with four in one place and three in another. They asked their care placement supervisor if they could be tested prior to starting work but were told there was no need. On the Saturday prior to starting work, one student nurse discovered she was a close contact of someone who is a positive case. She went to a GP and asked if she should be tested but was told there was no need. She told the GP she was going in to work in a nursing home on Monday and she was sure she should be tested. She was told she was only a close contact of a close contact of a positive case, so there was no need. She went to the length of pretending to have symptoms to beg for a test and having finally been tested, she tested positive. That is truly shocking.

I was sent a circular by a school principal which the Department of Education and Skills issued about two days ago. In it, the Department suggests that if a teacher is positive, rather than follow the normal contact tracing protocols of the public health system, that teacher should ring a mobile phone number at the Department of Education and Skills, which will in turn contact public health authorities to make decisions about who are the close contacts of that case and who should be excluded. The Department is interfering with the normal contact tracing and response to positive cases because the Government insists the schools must stay open. If that results in more clusters and outbreaks because contact tracing is not being done, who is to blame? Is that contributing more to the spread of this disease than the individuals this Bill proposes to target?

One can go through the list of failures. The Government's own strategy essentially says that there is a tolerable level of community circulation of the virus. Two weeks ago, it refused the advice of its own public health advisers with the result that the number of cases has almost doubled. It is the Government's failure to have a strategy and put in place the resources to fight Covid-19 that is the reason we are in this situation we find ourselves in now. Fines will not solve that.

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