The Taoiseach and Minister for Health say they only found out about plans to ask COVID-19 patients to carry out their own contact tracing when it was reported in the news last night.

Thousands of people who tested positive over the weekend will today receive a text message from the HSE to forward on to anyone they were in close contact with.

Officials took the decision after the national contact tracing system “essentially collapsed” under the strain of the number of new cases in recent days.

Speaking in the Dáil this afternoon, the Taoiseach Micheál Martin said he only found out what was happening after it was reported by The Irish Times.

“I got a text last evening which included The Irish Times article,” he said. “That is when I first knew, so I wasn’t informed of this operational measure that the HSE undertook in response to the extraordinary demands they were under in the context at the weekend in the context of the community tracing.”

Contact tracing

He said he is disappointed and unhappy with the situation but insisted there is “not a contact tracing system in the world that wouldn’t come under pressure” when faced with the per capita levels of virus facing Ireland.

He said Northern Ireland, the UK and a number of EU states are currently facing similar issues.

“I think we are about 11th highest in terms of actual testing capacity in the world,” he said. “Roughly, I don’t want to get into league tables or anything like that but our testing capacity is high.

“The contact tracing is under pressure; we are recruiting very fast; there are procedures to be run through in recruiting and we have been recruiting since August in terms of contact tracing.

Testing

He said Ireland is currently processing around 19,000 swabs a day and carrying out more than 120,000 tests a week.

He said the HSE is currently employing 400 contact tracers and 220 more will soon be hired.

He said he aims to see 3,000 people employed in testing and tracing in Ireland – with 1,000 solely focused on contact tracing.

Picture shows Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, TD.
Government sets out Plan for Covid Resilience and National Recovery.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said he also found out about the decision last night.

The spokesperson said the move was a temporary measure taken in response to the high numbers of people testing positive over the weekend.

They said the HSE had “undertaken a vast amount of work in difficult circumstances on the Irish testing system” in recent months.

It has reconfigured the contact tracing system for the rest of the week to allow it to handle 1,500 positive cases per day. Meanwhile, 70 new contact tracers are being recruited every week, with the health service aiming to increase its contact tracing force from 400 to 700.

The HSE processed 115,000 tests in the last week and was increasing its capacity to 120,000.

Collapse

The Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said it is hard to believe that the government is still failing to get contact tracing right, eight months into the pandemic.

“The contact tracing system became so swamped at the weekend that it completely broke down and it collapsed,” she said.

She said the HSE was now asking patients to do the job of a contact tracer and give their contacts health advice.

She said that was a “sure recipe for infections being missed and further outbreaks not being caught in time.”