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While there is significant capacity for coronavirus testing in Ireland, there appear to be difficulties after testing, according to Dr. Mary Favier, president of the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP).
On Sunday, HSE CEO Paul Reid said that the testing capacity in the state is now 15,000 per day. He said the response time for tests is 2.4 days on average, and that there are currently 3,010 licensed Covid-19 related healthcare workers.
Speaking Monday, Dr. Favier said robust testing and rapid contact tracing are necessary if the restrictions are to be lifted.
There are a variety of reasons for the delays, but overall the testing service has improved with results that, on average, return quickly, Dr. Favier told RTÉ Morning Ireland.
Dr. Favier said a week ago that the results took seven days, now it was three days for his patients. She described the change as “a definite improvement”.
ICGP has launched a helpline for general practitioners who address problems, which should be of help, he said.
Getting results within three days was good, he said, but then there were more delays with tracing contacts that could take another two days. That makes the service less effective, especially if the contacts had to be chased.
There is a good referral service, he said, but it was necessary to discover why in some cases it was difficult to get results more quickly.
“There is significant capacity to perform tests, the difficulty seems to be after the tests are collected,” he said.
Dr. Favier said she believed that the goal of 15,000 tests per day was possible, if it was necessary to do so many.
The number of people who died of coronaviruses in the state increased by 12 on Sunday, bringing the total number of deaths to 1,458. The number of confirmed cases in the republic increased by 236, to 22,996.
The latest figure from the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) indicates that the growth rate in infected cases remains stable at approximately 1 percent per day, with Sunday growth slightly above that level.
As of midnight Friday, 57 percent of cases in Ireland are female, while 43 percent are male. The median age of confirmed cases is 49 years, and 2,986 cases, or 13 percent, have been hospitalized.
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