About 40,000 people waiting up to five days for a test

There are now about 40,000 people in Ireland waiting for a test for the coronavirus, the HSE has said.

At a briefing on Sunday the HSE’s chief operations officer, Anne O’Connor, said the average waiting period for a test was four to five days.

However, she said the HSE had accelerated the provision of testing sites and was looking to reduce the waiting period over coming days. There are 35 testing sites but by Tuesday this is expected to rise to 41. The largest of these, at Cork's Páirc Uí Chaoimh where 1,000 tests a day could be provided, opened on Sunday. The LE Samuel Beckett navy vessel is now also being used as a testing site in Dublin.

In total, the HSE is looking at providing up to 50 testing centres across the State.

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About 13,000 people have already been tested for the coronavirus. Overall, Ms O’Connor said there were now 177 people in hospital with Covid-19. She said this had increased from 151 on Saturday morning. There are 29 people in intensive care units.

There was capacity in the hospital system to deal with growing numbers of patients with Covid-19, she added, with 2,243 vacant beds at present including 173 ICU beds.

On foot of concerns raised by doctors about a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for use when dealing with patients with Covid-19, HSE chief executive Paul Reid said the health service had "a good stock overall".

He said in the past week or so in some particular areas and hospitals “things ran tighter” than in others and “we have been looking at some re-distribution”.

"We have been working in a very difficult market and have been securing significant orders, including one for more than €200 million in China. "

He said orders for PPE would include 11 million masks, one million goggles, 400,000 gowns and suits.

Supplies of new PPE would be air freighted to Ireland, the HSE chief said.

Private sector

Mr Reid said the HSE was working with the private hospital sector and, overall, there would now be a capacity of about 500 intensive care beds.

He said procurement of ventilators was continuing. “We’ve already secured 300 and a further 1,000 will be delivered over the coming weeks.”

The pandemic would place the Irish health service under stress “like we’ve never known before” over the coming weeks, he added. The scale of the problem would put the regular winter overcrowding experienced in Irish hospitals “into context”.

However, he said the health service was planning for what was to come.

The HSE is looking to establish 10,000 extra beds including field hospitals where those who are less acutely sick can be cared for without visiting a hospital.

Specialist in public health medicine Dr Sarah Doyle said an increase in the level of testing for the coronavirus would inevitably lead to a rise in the number of confirmed cases. She said the health service wanted to find these cases so contact tracing of others who may have been infected could be carried out.

Mr Reid said the scale of contact tracing would increase significantly with more than 1,000 people involved in the process shortly.

Dr Doyle said the chances of someone contracting the Covid-19 virus were still low but this was increasing.

She said there were no plans to introduce testing for people who had no symptoms or randomised testing.

Asked about reports of a cluster of positive cases at a nursing home, the HSE said outbreaks of infectious diseases in nursing homes were not uncommon and staff were used to dealing with this issue. However, the scale and numbers would be extremely challenging.

The HSE has asked the media not to identify any nursing homes concerned.

Meanwhile, the HSE has begun interviewing some of the 50,000 people who put their names forward to work in the health service to deal with the coronavirus outbreak. It said about 1,500 nurses had said they were currently not working in the Irish health system and they were the priority (to recruit) as were the 1,000 doctors who had volunteered including 200 not currently in the Irish system.

It said about 400 ambulance personnel had put their names forward too.