Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Many staff were redeployed into primary and acute care. Some went back into retirement. An amazing number of people had come out of retirement. Students went back to college. In recent weeks, the HSE has been successfully asking people to come back and has been deploying, where possible, from acute settings. However, the acute settings are under severe pressure and one of the areas we were able to bring staff from last time was PCR testing. We now have capacity of approximately 225,000 PCR tests per week. The students are back in college so it is more difficult. We are calling out to everyone we can to come in to allow us have as many people as possible available. Regardless of that, between third doses and boosters, approximately 210,000 vaccines were administered in the past seven days, which is good. We are looking to increase that all the time.

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