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Contact trackers will begin investigating where people are infected with Covid-19, after the state’s public health team admitted this week that it cannot say where cases are occurring in the community.
In a letter to the government, the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) said that the retrospective contact tracing would gather additional information on the Covid-19 cases so far labeled only as “community transmission.”
Last night, an HSE source said that the tracking teams will now play as a “detective” and investigate in greater detail the movements and contacts of a confirmed case of Covid-19 to identify bars, gyms, restaurants or other places at risk.
The change comes after Professor Philip Nolan said last week that people are only asked about their contacts during the 48 hours before they develop symptoms, rather than tracking where they might have been infected.
His statement came after pubs and restaurants complained that they were being blamed for the increase in cases, even though all HSE charts had left few such cases on their doorstep.
However, Professor Nolan said the cases were labeled as community transmission even though they could have arisen first in a restaurant or bar because public health teams did not have the resources to fully identify people’s movements.
In a letter sent to the government on Thursday, Acting Medical Director Ronan Glynn said the team had endorsed “enhanced retrospective contact tracing” of confirmed Covid-19 cases to ensure the system is “as robust as possible.”
The new research would highlight potential sources of infection and help identify people at risk because of where they move in the community.
Localized interventions
“This approach will allow the environments and activities associated with the highest levels of transmission to be identified more accurately and quickly,” Dr. Glynn told the Government.
Professor Kirsten Schaffer, president of the Irish Society for Clinical Microbiology, told the Oireachtas Covid-19 committee that public health teams only ask people with a positive test for details of the people they have met in the last 48 hours. .
This gap, he said, was preventing the development of more refined or localized interventions, although public health physicians said they did not have the resources or the time for more detailed work.
In the fortnight to September 19, 36% of the cases are linked to the community or to possible community transmission.
In its guidelines, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control says contact tracing should “quickly identify secondary cases that may arise after transmission of known primary cases to intervene and interrupt subsequent transmission.”
Contact tracing for Japan and South Korea goes further back to establish where the sick person contracted the virus, leading to a greater understanding of in what settings and situations the virus can spread.
Mental health concerns
Meanwhile, more than 70 mental health organizations have expressed serious concern about the absence of mental health in the Health Services Executive’s Win Plan for 2020, warning that demand for services will increase dramatically in the coming months.
The focus “on keeping people with physical health needs out of hospital beds is welcome and understandable,” said Mental Health Reform Executive Director Fiona Coyle, but “keeping people with mental health problems outside the hospital “is also vital.
Calling for additional funds to repair “this blatant neglect,” Ms Coyle said mental health will become a major problem “during the harsh winter months ahead” when access to services will be more difficult.
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