HSE chief Paul Reid is warning that around a third of people identified as close contacts are still not turning up for their second test.
People who are in close contact with anyone confirmed to have contracted COVID-19 have to isolate for 14 days and attend for two tests.
The system is in place because it can take time for the virus to manifest and become detectable.
Earlier this year, HSE Chief Executive Paul Red warned that a large proportion of people were not turning up for their second test.
On The Hard Shoulder today, he said far too many people are still not turning up – despite an improvement in recent weeks.
“We do a Day Zero test and we do a Day Seven test,” he said. “The Day Zero test had been at about 50%, we put a lot of communications behind that and it is at about 92% now, which is really good but we want to get it to 100%.
“The Day Seven test had been at about 20% and it grew, over the last few weeks, to 50%. That is closer to 70% now again.
“I would like to take the opportunity to urge your listeners, if they are identified as a contact, come forward for your Day Zero test and equally come forward for you Day Seven test.
“The reality is that the percentage of contacts who test positive is over 10% on the Day Zero test and there is still a percentage that tests positive on Day Seven.
“You might not test positive on Day Zero but you might test positive on Day Seven. So, it is really important. We have seen a trend upwards but we want to make it to 100%.”
Testing and tracing
Mr Reid said Ireland should be really proud of its testing and tracing system – despite the HSE’s decision to ask nearly 2,000 people to carry out their own contact tracing after the system became overwhelmed last week.
He said daily case figure had jumped from around 500 a day to 1,200 in a very short period of time and noted that countries all over Europe were experiencing similar problems.
“It just scaled well and above the resources we had scheduled for that weekend,” he said. “It shouldn’t have happened. It did happen and we have apologised for how it happened.
“We have learned from that and we are in the process of making contact with all of those 1,971 people to just assess how they did.”
Coronavirus
He said there are now around 570 people working on contact tracing in Ireland.
“What has been achieved in Ireland in terms of our contact testing and tracing is actually something we should be proud of,” he said.
“We now rank second across a number of countries across Europe, just after Denmark in terms of the volume of testing we are doing per capita and having achieved the scaling up in our lab capacity and reached our 120,000 capacity, it has been quite good.
“Yes, things have gone wrong, we have tried to fix them but equally we should be proud of what we have achieved to date in terms of our contact racing and testing.”
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