Nursing home infected with Covid-19 after failure to contact-trace GAA player, Dáil told

A “total systems failure” in the development of a contact tracing system for Covid-19 cases is the reason the Border counties have had restrictions raised to Level 4, it has been claimed.

Independent TD Verona Murphy made the claim in the Dáil as she highlighted an incident where a nursing home in Wexford became infected with coronavirus because of what she said was a failure in contact tracing.

Ms Murphy said the incident involved “a young man, a GAA player who tested positive but hadn’t actually been contact traced for six days. His girlfriend, whom he lives with, works in a nursing home. That nursing home is now infected.

“It took six days to contact trace somebody who had played GAA, did all of the right things, just played GAA and is infected.”

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Ms Murphy said the system was “inefficient and totally ineffective and that’s why we’re at Level 4 and most likely going to Level 5”.

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar insisted, however, that people really needed to understand the public health message.

“If a GAA player or anyone tests positive for this virus their close contacts must restrict their movements. You don’t wait to be called, you don’t wait to be contact traced, you don’t have to wait to be tested.”

Mr Varadkar said he would check on that case but said the median turnaround time was two days but added he understood there were exceptions.

Ms Murphy said an effective system would “test, trace and isolate” but the current system had failed “miserably”.

The Government failed to put a system in place of contact tracing when the numbers were low. She said that when there were 70 or 80 cases a day there was no effective contact tracing.

“And now the numbers have spiralled to multiples of that in every county. It’s just spiralled out of control,” she said, adding the “inability to put in place the most basic elementary and logistical solution in contact tracing is the real reason we’re moving to Level 4”.

It was a “total systems failure in contact tracing”.

Responding, Mr Varadkar said: “I don’t think your argument that it is down to failures in testing and tracing really stacks up”.

He said that Denmark did three times as much testing as Ireland and it was experiencing a second wave with a similar incidence of the virus as Ireland.

Germany handled the first wave really well and “is extraordinarily impressive in terms of its ability to test and trace and isolate people [but has] just recorded a record number of cases, higher than even during the first wave”.

He said everywhere in Europe is recording record numbers despite their best efforts.

“We should avoid the temptation to make it so simplistic that if only x,y or z had been done by somebody else it all would have been grand.”

Mr Varadkar said the people “who are really overwhelmed at the moment are the wonderful people working in our laboratories who are processing 15,000 tests a day”, medical doctors and contact tracers who are attempting to contact 1,000 people a day.

“If we’re going to have a couple of hundred or 1,000 positives a day and everyone has six or seven contacts, that’s 7,000 people a day that have to be contact traced. You’d need an army of people, probably bigger than our army.”

The Tánaiste said the best people could do would be to follow public health advice to reduce contacts to the minimum possible while still living a realistic life.