Leo Varadkar has been challenged for the Government to produce a “gold standard” in testing and tracing for Covid-19.
Mr Varadkar was representing the Government during Leaders’ Questions when the Social Democats’ leader, Catherine Murphy, to step up to the mark on testing and tracing.
Mr Varadkar said that “testing is going extremely well.”
Ms Murphy said: “I was told that there would be 90 people recruited each week and up to 800 overall would be recruited on the contact tracing side.
“We were looking for a gold standard in relation to this.
“It is absolutely vital.”
Mr Varadkar responded: “At the moment we are up to 120,000 tests per week.
“This compares very favourably: we rank eighth out of 23 western European countries.
“We are ahead of places like Germany or New Zealand.
“We are behind a country like Denmark, which is doing a lot more testing than us, but now has a higher incidence of the virus than we do.
“That indicates that it is not all about testing, although testing is extremely important.
“On contact tracing we are trying to ensure that that is up to a higher level at the end of level 5.
“We are trying to use level 5 to put in place even more robust testing and contact tracing regimes than we had before.
“Testing is going extremely well.
“We have the capacity to test 120,000 per week.
“We are really trying to scale up the number of people working in the tracing centres.
“I am told that there are 650 people working in the tracing centres at the moment, of whom 344 are new recruits.
“The rest are staff redeployed from other areas.”
