The HSE has protected its decision to suspend serial screening in meat plants to fulfill the rise in recommendations for Covid-19 tests from GPs for people showing signs in the community.
Paul Reid, chief executive of the HSE, said that it was the “ideal choice” to redeploy resources from serial, asymptomatic screening in food processing plants because if the trend of community testing recommendations continued, the system would be practically at its weekly capacity of 100,000 tests.
Speaking at the HSE’s weekly Covid-19 rundown, he stated the number of GP referrals for screening this week – a big proportion of which was for children going back to school and people in north Dublin – produced a “significant obstacle on the daily lab testing because we are reaching capacity.”
Mr Reid said that the HSE needed to “triage” testing and prioritise the referral of individuals who were revealing Covid-19 symptoms and need to take “the ideal day-to-day agile choices.”
” We have the 100,000 capability. We need to address what comes at us on a daily basis and we need to take public health assistance and the prioritisation of resources,” said Mr Reid.
Asked if the weekly capability of 100,000 tests, which equates to approximately 14,200 a day, required to be increased, he stated: “If capacity needs to be increased, we will need to look for that.”
The HSE received 13,000 referrals for tests on Monday and an additional 8,000 on Tuesday, requiring the health service to hold off scheduled serial screening on asymptomatic cases in meat plants and food processing business – a high-risk area that led to local lockdowns last month – to next week.
” Both of these [days ] are considerable boosts on a regular day’s referral for community screening, which has normally been 4,000 to 5,000,” Mr Reid told press reporters at the instruction in UCD in Dublin.
The 21,000 recommendations for community screening in a two-day duration compares to 28,000 community test recommendations for the entire of last week and 25,000 the week before. This amounted to an increase of 16.5 per cent in community screening needs in the week, he said.
Mr Reid stated that on some days, need for laboratory screening had actually reached in excess of 14,000, which is close to the State’s day-to-day capability for Covid-19 screening.
Niamh O’Beirne, the HSE’s lead on screening and contact tracing, stated that there are more than 12,000 appointments arranged for today for symptomatic individuals looking for Covid-19 tests.
” That makes our decision the best thing to have actually done to ensure we have the capability to do those tests in our community since on top of that 12,000, we will have at least 3,000 in the acute [hospital] system, so currently you are striking 15,000,” Ms O’Beirne said.
To manage the increased number of referrals for testing in the neighborhood, the HSE has actually opened three extra “pop-up” swabbing centres: in Limerick, Tallaght and Carlow-Kilkenny.
It is adding more personnel to increase vehicle lanes at screening centres in Swords and at Citywest in Dublin and was releasing more Defence Forces staff at the test centre at the Aviva arena.
Practically 57,000 swabs have been taken in serial screening of retirement home revealing a 0.2 per cent positivity rate and 12,800 swabs in meat plants, which showed a 0.27 percent positivity rate.
The positivity rate on tests in general has increased to more than 1 per cent over the past 6 weeks.
Mr Reid stated that the average end-to-end turn-around time from recommendation for a test to the contacts of an infected person being traced was 2.1 days and the median screening turn-around was 27 hours.
Limerick and Dublin
The HSE’s chief medical officer Dr Colm Henry stated that the 14- day occurrence rate of infections was 38 per 100,000 individuals for the nation but higher in Dublin, at 71 and Limerick, at 60.
The National Public Health Emergency Group would when it meets today be “mindful” in thinking about the choices for public health measures in response to greater infection rates in the two counties because of the impact that lockdowns have on children and older individuals, he stated.
” No one wants to return to a full-scale lockdown,” he stated, though he kept in mind the issue of regional resurgences of the illness on groups who are more vulnerable to winding up in health center.
” NPHET will be thinking about how we can tighten up on snuffing out the virus within homes by decreasing the chance the infection has to propagate to leap from one household to another,” he informed the briefing.
Dr Henry stated that there had actually been a “small however consistent boost” in the numbers of people aged over 75 – the age group most at threat from Covid-19 – who have been contracting the virus just recently.
The HSE said that the variety of people hospitalised with the coronavirus disease among 888 cases informed in between August 25 th and September 7th was 59, or 3.1 per cent.
Of the 59 people hospitalised with the illness in the 2 weeks to September 7th, 31 were aged 65 and over, 16 are under the age of 35 and 12 were aged between 35 and 65.
Mr Reid said the typical everyday variety of new Covid-19 cases over the previous seven days has been 151, up from 120 in a week.
The variety of confirmed cases in medical facilities has actually been trending upwards, standing at 50 now, up from 40 recently.
The number of cases in extensive care units stay stable at 6.
Mr Reid said that the HSE has actually a seen a “worrying pattern” of individuals presenting to the health services with anxiety and psychological issues throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
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