Just 2% of trained Covid-19 contact tracers employed as such
The Department of Health has confirmed that just 2% of the individuals trained as contact tracers in the fight against Covid-19 are currently employed to that end.
As of Tuesday of this week, just 40 of roughly 2,000 people trained to track the coronavirus via those it has infected were doing so.
At a fiery briefing from the National Public Health Emergency Team in Dublin, the chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan confirmed the number of contact tracers currently working to that end. His colleague Dr Siobhan ni Bhriain however suggested that given the low levels of new confirmed cases currently being seen, 40 people would be adequate in order to comprehensively trace their movements.
The low level of contact tracing being employed was criticised by Peadar Toibin, TD and leader of Aontu, as being emblematic of “the mismatch between capacity and need” in the Irish health service.
“I would urge the Government to ensure that we sweat the capacity of the resources that we have to the full extent so that we can bring this crisis to an end,” Mr Toibin said.
The briefing, which featured a number of feisty exchanges between Dr Holohan and those assembled, heard that a further 37 people have died from the coronavirus in Ireland, the largest such daily number seen for several days and which brings the overall death toll to 1,375.
Meanwhile 265 additional confirmed cases were announced bringing the overall total number of cases in the Republic to 22,248, with 78% of those thus far diagnosed with the disease having recovered.
On the subject of the Leaving Cert, which has faced a number of calls for its cancellation from across the spectrum in recent days, Dr Holohan said it was not his place to say how the exams could be held while simultaneously abiding by public health rules.
Education is not our area of expertise, our expertise is public health.
At present the delayed secondary exams are due to commence on July 29, though how the Government will stage them remains as yet unknown. Dr Holohan confirmed that he had briefed the Department of Education on a number of occasions in recent months, but declined to comment as to whether or not any of the State’s plans for the Leaving had met with the approval of NPHET.
Meanwhile, Dr Holohan confirmed that hairdressing as a profession had been quite deliberately delayed until July as part of the State’s roadmap to restarting the economy as it remains a “high risk behaviour”. The Irish Hairdresser Federation had yesterday called for salons and barber shops to reopen a month earlier, in June, than allowed for in the roadmap.
Dr Holohan said he would ask people to refrain from getting their hair cut in such settings in order to prevent “a risk being created before we think it is safe to do so”.
The latter half of the briefing was dominated by two testy exchanges - the first involving Dr Holohan and Philip Ryan, the political editor of the Irish Independent, in which the chief medical officer categorically denied that NPHET had suggested that the elderly people be asked to remain cocooned until the last of the five phases designed to re-open the country.
The second saw a Jemima Burke, claiming to be from the Western News newspaper (which does not appear to exist), ask Dr Holohan about the case of Sally Maaz, a 17-year-old Leaving Cert student who died in Mayo University Hospital in late April.
In angry exchanges lasting nearly 15 minutes, Dr Holohan insisted that it would be “inappropriate” to discuss the details of a named patient, adding that it is “clearly policy that people known to have this infection and vulnerable people are not mixed with each other”.
