Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We will just have to agree to disagree on the system collapsing. As I said, obviously one does not want people having to contact their own close contacts. As a one-off event in nine months or so of a global pandemic, I certainly do not believe that constitutes a collapse at all.

I cannot speak to people saying an additional 800. I am pretty sure what I have been saying is that it is scaling up to 800. It will have gone from 231 in mid-September to 800, a significant increase. What is important now is that the capacity is there to rapidly contact and trace 1,500 cases a day. We all need to make sure we never get close to 1,500 cases a day. While we do not know what the future will hold, the cases are certainly coming down now. The focus for the short term, but, hopefully, for the medium and longer term as well, will be less on having to do the high numbers and more around speed, getting to people, getting to their close contacts, going deep and doing both the backwards and forwards contact tracing.

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