John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)
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749. To ask the Minister for Health his plans to further streamline Covid-19 testing and to increase its capacity to reduce the number of days of schools missed by schoolchildren and work days by their parents and guardians, who currently will be forced to isolate for two to five days; if his attention has been drawn to the fact that the inconvenience to families will result in some parents not getting their children tested due to the amount of time off school; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [23811/20]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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A comprehensive, reliable and responsive testing and tracing operation is central to our public health strategy for containing and slowing the spread of COVID-19. The HSE has worked intensively since the start of the pandemic to put this in place and I would again like to acknowledge the huge work undertaken in this regard across the HSE.

Capacity has been in place since early summer to test 15,000 people a day/100,000 people per week. The testing and contact tracing operational and resource model has been designed to flex up and down as needed.  In recent weeks we have needed to flex it up significantly as demand has increased. We are testing more people than ever before, with almost 70,000 tests completed in the week ending 7th September. The HSE has deployed additional resources to meet this level of demand, including the opening of additional community testing centres and mobile pop-up testing units, significantly increased contact tracing teams and increased laboratory testing. 

We had seen improvements in turnaround times over the week ending 7th September. 85% of GP referrals received an appointment the same day or the next day - the median being 0.9 days. The median time from swab to lab result was 29 hours. In total, the median end-to-end turnaround time for negative tests in the community setting ranged from 2.0-2.1 days while median end-to-end turnaround time from referral to communication of a positive result was 2.3-2.8 days. I do acknowledge that the system has come under strain in recent weeks, with a very significant increase in demand experience last week which resulted in some delays. There was a record of 13,000 referrals to community testing on Monday alone, and demand remained high for the week. As outlined above, additional capacity has been brought on stream quickly to meet this demand. 

It is critical that parents continue to contact their GP if their child has any of the symptoms of COVID-19. The impact that the requirement to restrict movements has while waiting for a test and a test result is understood. But it is essential to prevent any further transmission of the virus, protecting other children and teachers in school and the community more generally.

More generally, the HSE is now finalising a future service model for testing and tracing. This service model will aim to deliver a patient-centred, accessible, consistent and flexible service.  This plan includes the recruitment of a permanent workforce which has already commenced, and a range of other service improvements which will be rolled out over the coming weeks to ensure that people can access a test quickly and get their result quickly. Transition to the new model is underway and will continue through the Autumn.