Sir, – You write that a lack of retrospective contact tracing means that the authorities appear not to know what is driving the recent stalling of the decline in positive case numbers ("The Irish Times view on Covid-19 strategy: the tracing gap exposed", March 23rd). You go on to opine that, a year into the pandemic, that's not good enough.
This basic failure has cost lives, as well as tens of thousands of jobs and billions of euro in exchequer treasure.
The experience of the past 15 months has shown that no country was fully prepared to deal with Covid-19. But, insofar as excellence or merely competence in data processing and information technology was to be part of the planning for the onset of any pandemic and of dealing with its effects, one might reasonably think that Ireland, the tech capital of Europe, was very favourably positioned. Anyone harbouring that thought has been sorely disappointed at every turn.
Your lead story on May 13th last (“Tech issues slow down Covid-19 test and trace programme”) noted that the critical programme of testing and tracing was not fit for purpose because of the use of inaccurate manual systems, the absence of a system for laboratory information management, the fact that our hospitals operate on different computer systems so that their computers “don’t talk to each other” and because, believe it or not, we did not have a unique patient identifier.
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You reported last July that, in the city of Silicon Docks, the passenger locator form would be put on an electronic basis “by August 10th” replacing the pen-and-paper system which had theretofore greeted those arriving at our airports.
Six months into Ireland’s experience of the virus and as the Minister for Health warned of the possibility of a new lockdown, the HSE chief told us of plans “being finalised” to embrace technology changes in our system for testing and tracing (“HSE chief outlines plan for surge in hospitals”, August 26th).
It is, perhaps, the relatively small things that best illustrate the greater reality of administrative chaos in our public health bureaucracy. Late in October we learned that the HSE found it easier to recruit contact tracers (about eight months too late) than to provide them with laptops.
It is, surely, a dysfunctional management which finds it beyond its capability to plan for the simultaneous arrival of new recruits and laptops.
This was a week after the HSE asked people who had tested positive to do their own contact tracing and a month after Paul Reid, chief executive of the HSE, rather injudiciously shared his view that the UK’s test-and-trace system was close to collapse.
Jennifer O’Connell’s piece “Unsung heroes who reinforced Covid battle from behind frontline” (March 13th) tells of HSE managers adapting to the emerging pandemic. An estates manager with the HSE had been working on a digital transformation project but had to put it on ice as her team was asked to deliver beds. We should all hope that the digital transformation project has been taken off ice, even if it is not months but years too late. – Yours, etc,
PAT O’BRIEN,
Crossmolina
Co Mayo.