Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has said that what is happening in nursing homes is not because of the lack of rapid testing.
The public health advice he had was that weekly PCR testing was “valuable and important”.
Mr Donnelly told Newstalk’s Pat Kenny show that he was a strong advocate for rapid testing, but that rapid testing was not a substitute for PCR testing.
“The HSE has worked so hard and so closely with nursing homes who have had such a tough year, we can't be blaming people that a highly contagious and deadly virus has made its way into some of these places.”
Two tests have been validated for use and the HSE has bought and distributed half a million tests to health care settings, to be used in conjunction with PCR, not instead of, he added. “I've set up an expert group chaired by Mark Ferguson who is the Government’s chief scientific officer to answer exactly the question — are there other places we should be deploying rapid testing.”
Mr Donnelly said that the best description he’d had was that rapid testing was not a surveillance tool and it was not a mass testing tool, “I'm told it doesn't work very well when you're just testing a whole population who may be non-symptomatic, but where it can be very effective is in identifying people who have a high viral load and may be highly contagious.
The public health advice he received came from people who had looked at international evidence, results of trials, the sensitivity, specificity and how accurate the tests were.
“One of the concerns that has been raised several times is because accuracy is low, there is a real fear that people who test negative - it's not really telling you you're clear of coronavirus, it's telling you that you're not highly contagious. People think they're grand and act in a less careful manner.”
