Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party)
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2187. To ask the Minister for Health the reason Ireland has not been sharing Covid-19 data with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (details supplied). [36362/21]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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On May 14th the HSE suffered a major cyber-attack on its IT systems which significantly interrupted the usual processes for surveillance reporting, including reporting to international organisations including the ECDC, and has required the development of interim surveillance arrangements.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the HSE-HPSC has uploaded COVID-19 data from the national infectious disease surveillance system (CIDR) and other sources to ECDC via The European Surveillance System (TESSy system) on a weekly basis. These data were used to populate a range of ECDC outputs which describe the epidemiological situation across Europe, including the “Maps in support of the council recommendation on a coordinated approach to travel measures in the EU”, www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/situation-updates/weekly-maps-coordinated-restriction-free-movement

HPSC has continued to provide daily updates to ECDC on the estimated number of cases and these data, including 14-day case notification rate per 100,000 inhabitants have been published on their website uninterrupted since the cyber-attack.

However, not all practices were possible with the interim surveillance arrangements, including the reporting of all data necessary for ECDC to populate their maps. The principal reason was because these more detailed datasets must be uploaded through TESSy, access to which has not been possible until all necessary measures were put in place to assure the safety of the HSE network.

Permission to access TESSy again was granted by the ECDC during the ending 25/06/2021. HPSC has developed work around solutions to prepare the necessary data. Data was uploaded on 29/06/2021, and Ireland was included in the map published on Thursday 01/07/2021 and in each subsequent weekly update.