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New coronavirus contact tracing recruits were told to bring their own laptop to work because HSE laptops are not yet available, it has emerged.
According to a list of guidelines seen by The Irish Times, new recruits were told that after a period of following other contact tracing personnel at a facility, they would be put on the roster for work.
The correspondence asked the recruits to “bring your laptop if you have one. You may not need one while you are tracking, but you will need it to work as we are still waiting for the HSE laptops. ”
On Tuesday night, an HSE spokeswoman denied that the recruits were being asked to work on their laptops and said they would not access the tracking system.
“A small number of new contact tracker recruits were asked to bring their own laptops to training at one of our centers,” the spokeswoman said.
“Due to the large number of new additions, 270 last Friday, a small number of new laptops are not yet available.
“This cohort of contact trackers in training will not access the live Covid Care Tracker system until they are in possession of a work laptop. The Covid Care Tracker is a Microsoft Cloud system on a secure server and cannot be accessed from external devices.
“All new contact trackers will have a working laptop before they are listed to start tracking contacts,” the spokeswoman said.
Elsewhere, new HSE statistics show a recent spike in the number of cases that caused delays in contact tracing and response times “well above the normal range.”
Tracking
Figures, published in The Irish Times, show that in the seven days to last Thursday, most positive cases took more than four days to complete the testing and tracing process.
This is the same period when pressure on the system prompted the HSE to ask nearly 2,000 people to conduct their own contact tracing.
Data shows that 53.2 percent of positive cases took more than 96 hours from referral for testing to completion of contact tracing.
The figures show that only 0.6% of positive cases completed the process in less than 24 hours, during the period, and 16.6% in less than three days, which is the period recommended by most experts. .
The HSE said in a statement that “the considerable increases in cases put the contact tracing system under significant pressure and increased response times well outside the normal range.”
For negative cases, which do not need to be tracked by contacts, the response time was much faster. The HSE said it is meeting its goal of completing this process in three days for 90 percent of the samples. He said that as of last Friday, the HSE contact tracing system has been “back within normal time frames.”
Meanwhile, Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said last night that it was too early to say whether Ireland had taken a turn in its management of Covid-19.
720 more cases were confirmed Tuesday, down from a high of more than 1,000 over an eight-day period earlier in the month. Five deaths were also reported, bringing the total to 1,890.
Furthermore, an HSE briefing for the Oireachtas health committee revealed the events that led to the decision to ask 1,971 people to conduct their own contact tracing.
While the system “worked well” in August and September, a “sudden and significant” increase in cases in early October “exceeded the capacity of our tracking system as established.”
Contact trackers also reduced the number of questions they asked people to speed up calls.
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