HSE warns of “massive” long-term Covid-19 bill

The state is facing a “massive” health bill that exceeds one billion euros to pay for the long-term battle against the Covid-19 pandemic, warned the executive director of the Health Service, Paul Reid.

The HSE faces a € 1 billion annual bill for personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers and a “very significant similar cost” to establish a testing and tracking system to find infected contacts of new cases with in order to free the country from the pandemic restrictions, Reid said.

The state will require a “future model” of testing and tracking beyond the “wartime model” established in the past 10 weeks in response to the deadly virus outbreak, he added.

The new test and trace operation would cost several hundred million euros, according to high-level health service sources.

The number of deaths from coronavirus increased in 12 other deaths reported on Sunday to 1,458. This was the lowest daily total since March 30.

A further 236 people were diagnosed with the disease, with a total of 22,996 confirmed cases.

Unforeseen scale

Reid said at the weekly HSE briefing that testing and tracing were “two key enablers” to “unlock society” and that the cost would be “on a scale that no one could have anticipated.”

“The compensation for not investing in this is the cost to society, either through increased transmission of the disease or additional restrictions that also come at a cost.

“It is still going through the government right now and we are still working on some of the ongoing cost and fixed cost issues of what is involved,” Reid said.

the The Department of Public Expenditures and Reform has to approve the plan and is examining costs based on demand levels for the rest of the year, a senior health source said.

Nursing home visits

The HSE planned to introduce a 24-hour response target to track and inform contacts of anyone newly infected this week, a service spokeswoman said.

This would drop from an average of 36 hours currently for a “non-complex case” and would apply to approximately 80 percent of all recently confirmed Covid-19 cases.

“To get to the point of being able to contact someone in a timely manner, there is still work to be done. It’s still not timely enough, “said Mary Codd, professor of epidemiology at UCD.

The nursing home regulator, the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa), urged state health officials to start discussions on a plan to reopen nursing homes to visitors, as a home operator warned older residents “would die of loneliness” instead of Covid-19, according to Hiqa’s deputy chief inspector, Susan Cliff.

In another development, The Irish Times has established that post-mortem examinations have been conducted of the remains of only five people who died from confirmed Covid-19.