Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank first of all the Chair, Deputy McNamara, and the members of the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response for their very hard and diligent work over many months throughout this year. The committee’s work has been invaluable in gathering information, questioning witnesses and in promoting a greater degree of understanding of this new virus.

I am sure the House will also join me in thanking the many witnesses who made themselves available to the committee to assist it in its work, particularly in the context of the very difficult circumstances everyone has been labouring in this year. I thank the committee's secretariat which has the onerous task of making us all look good. We do our best to help it with it but I have no doubt that in this case the secretariat worked as hard as it always does in supporting members. I note that while I was a founding member of the committee I sadly did not make it onto the Facebook page for the committee. The Minister of State, Deputy Butler, and I have been disappeared by the secretariat in the report but I certainly thoroughly enjoyed my time on the committee.

When the committee commenced its work in May we in Ireland were slowly coming out of the first wave of Covid-19, which had a very substantial impact right across the country and as we all know it led to a very significant loss of life, particularly amongst our older population. As the committee submitted its report in early October we were starting to see an increase in cases emerging again.

Thankfully, however, the measures that have been taken and the lessons learned during the first wave of the virus have enabled us, as a country, to drive down the levels of infection once more. In fact, we are seeing more than a 90% reduction in fatalities in the second wave compared with the first. This means that for every ten people who tragically lost their lives in the first wave, one life has been lost in the second. By any measure, while every single loss of life is one too many, that level of life saved is an extraordinary improvement. I pay tribute to our healthcare workers, our nursing home workers and every family and person who has done so much to keep people safe and alive. Seeing more than 90% reduction in the level of fatality, which ultimately is what it is all about, is not down to any one person or group of people; it is a nation working together, shoulder by shoulder, to look out for each other and keep each other safe and it has worked incredibly well and the nation deserves thanks for that.

With regard to our healthcare workers, I have just come from a visit to St. Vincent's University Hospital where I met the critical care, emergency medicine and laboratory teams. These people and the dedicated professionals and healthcare workers throughout Ireland have been working night and day. They have been innovating, learning and adapting at incredible speed in response to Covid. I acknowledge once more the work they have done.

It is clearly very important to focus on what we can do better but it is worth reflecting on the fact that we, as a nation, have managed to suppress this virus in recent weeks. Our numbers have increased in the past week, and that is something we all need to work on, but right now we still have the third lowest rate of Covid per 100,000 population anywhere in Europe. For every 100,000 people in Ireland, 114 tested positive in the past 14 days. Many European countries are seeing multiples of this. In France it is 789 and in Austria it is 1084. In Italy, which suffered so terribly during the first wave, it is 799. A number of European states have seen their hospital systems at maximum capacity and some countries have had to send patients to Germany for treatment when their own critical care resources were exhausted. In Switzerland, the number of people in intensive care now from Covid is higher than it was during the first wave. By any international standard, the people and healthcare workers of Ireland have done an incredible job in adapting and learning how to push this virus back and keep each other safe.

The rise of the virus, of course, is why the Government has taken such extensive measures throughout the pandemic to limit transmission when it was required in order to ensure that we protected lives. We did not have a situation in either the first or the second wave whereby our hospitals and critical care units were overrun. However, many families here have been scarred by the pandemic and I want to take the opportunity to recognise their loss and pay tribute to them and to recognise those who have lost their lives. As of yesterday, and as we all know, the number of fatalities from Covid-19 exceeded 2,000. That was a very sobering moment. As well as this very large loss of life, while some of those who have acquired Covid are alive, they are suffering from what is called long Covid. Our understanding of this is still evolving but the medical literature is replete with information on the lingering and often debilitating effects of the disease.

The report of the special committee contains a number of recommendations for the future design and provision of care for older people and I have to say it is a very welcome development. A significant proportion of those who died were nursing home residents. I have met some bereaved families and I know many of them are looking for answers. I am sure they are all looking for answers. They deserve answers. Many factors have to be considered, I am looking at the best way to get them the answers they want, need and deserve. Many of the challenges identified in the committee's report are reflected, as its Chairman said, in the nursing home expert panel report published in August. Immediately following the publication of the expert panel's report the Minister of State and I moved to establish the implementation committee, and this includes an interagency oversight team and a reference group. Work is progressing on the implementation of the recommendations and I acknowledge the leadership role the Minister of State is taking on this absolutely essential work.

It is important to appreciate that approximately half of our nursing homes, and the Chairman of the committee made a similar point, have remained free of Covid-19. Recognising the difficult landscape that Covid 19 has presented for long-term residential care settings, a series of enhanced measures have been agreed to support these settings and they are being actively monitored and implemented by HIQA and the HSE. Clinical guidance, personal protective equipment, PPE, staffing, serial testing, infection prevention and control, training and quite considerable financial support have been provided to the public and private nursing home sector. In addition to public health outbreak control teams, multidisciplinary clinical supports are in place at community healthcare organisation, CHO, level through 23 Covid-19 response teams, as well as outbreak control team, which respond to outbreaks as they occur.

The committee's report also very rightly focuses on testing and tracing and there was an interim report to this end. The more we work to push for the most extensive, quickest and comprehensive testing and tracing system the better. Our testing programme has expanded considerably in recent times and we are now up to a capacity of 140,000 polymerase chain reaction, PCR, tests per week which, by international standards, puts us right up there as one of the highest in the world. So far, there have been 1.8 million tests and we continue to undertake serial testing of all staff in nursing homes and food production, while also performing mass school testing where it is deemed appropriate. The number of contact tracers has risen significantly and from mid-September to now we have seen an approximately 2.5 to three fold increase. I want to see contact tracing being as quick as possible and as deep as possible, in terms of forward and backward contact tracing, so we can identify as quickly as possible the sources and deploy the outbreak control teams, find who is affected, support them, get them tested and isolate them.

Most encouragingly, as colleagues are aware, we have seen the emergence of very positive results on at least two of the vaccine candidates in development. I caution everyone, of course, as the public health experts keep cautioning me when I get excited by the results we are seeing, that a good deal of work, including some clinical validation from our own side, still needs to be done before we fully understand the effectiveness of the vaccines, for how long they may provide immunity, whether their effectiveness differs in different age groups and so forth. For now, we have to rely on the tools immediately available to us, which are the use of face masks, social distancing protocols, respiratory hygiene and complying with the other public health measures. These still remain vital. If we do these things it gives us the best chance of continuing to suppress the virus. I urge all Deputies to continue to promote the public health messaging that is so important. I recognise the work and advocacy everyone here and every Deputy has shown and continues to show in an all-Oireachtas approach to supporting the public health measures and I thank them all very much.

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