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

The Taoiseach said something earlier with which I thoroughly agree, which is that if Covid-19 is widespread in the community, the consequences are felt in the hospitals. We are seeing them in hospitals throughout the country. In that context, we should be concerned about the fact that the reduction in the number of cases appears to have stalled in a worrying manner. While everybody supports the objective of keeping schools open, there are significant concerns about whether the contact tracing of positive cases in schools is adequate to establish whether schools are acting as a vector for transmission of the virus.

I will put it simply. When we closed down the schools during the last period of restrictions, we got community transmission down to almost zero. They have been left open this time and now the efforts to reduce community transmission are stalling. I am not saying the two are necessarily connected, but we need to know. Teachers and parents are expressing concerns that children or teachers who would see themselves as close contacts of confirmed cases are not being contacted by public health teams or not being deemed as such because of the narrow definition of close contacts being operated, which is out of sync with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDC, close contact protocols. Does this not need to be examined?

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