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THE MEDIAN TURNAROUND time from referral for a Covid-19 test to the completion of contact tracing is now 2.83 days, the HSE has said.
This compares to a median turnaround time of 1.8 days around this time last month.
Due to the increased demand for testing over the last two weeks, the HSE has stood up additional contact tracing centres, with UCD starting its operation on 9 August.
Over the weekend, centres in Limerick and Dublin operated by Revenue commenced contact tracing work and the Army band started on 15 August.
More than 800 contact tracing calls were made on Sunday alone.
Monaghan GP Illona Duffy told TheJournal.ie that a positive result for one of her patients came back Friday evening and yesterday she was still waiting for a call about contact tracing.
“She didn’t get a call from public health to let her know about her positive test until Saturday, I had checked our results Friday evening and when I saw it was positive I called her to let her know.
“For nobody to be in touch about contact tracing three days after the result means those who were in close contact with her weren’t aware of their need to isolate or get a test.”
Duffy said the system works well in many cases, but after months in operation it should be “seamless”.
“I don’t understand why we don’t have our act together in relation to contact tracing and the communication of results at this stage, there’s no excuse.”
She said even one positive case with delayed contact tracing can impact on the spread of the disease in the community.
The HSE said it cannot comment on individual cases for confidentiality reasons but denied there is any backlog in the contact tracing process.
However, it said the increase in the number of close contacts of a confirmed case “does mean the closure of cases inevitably takes longer”.
For the seven days up to 16 August, the median end-to-end turnaround time for community and hospital tests from referral to the completion of contact tracing was 2.83 days.
The HSE said it will continue to add capacity to the contact tracing capacity to meet projected demand.
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Given the relatively low numbers of tests being carried out this is just not good enough. The spin and rubbish that we’ve been fed for months about testing and contact tracing has been proven to be just that, nonsense. If that is the median figure, many people are waiting for quite a bit longer to get results. I know someone who,as recently as last week, waited four days before the test result came back which meant contact tracing didn’t start until at least day five. The only way to stop outbreaks bleeding out into the wider community is to have real time testing and isolation of suspected cases followed by rapid contact tracing. Are the government ever going to get their act together on this??
@Kevin Lonergan: Kevin, what about all the false positives and false negatives. Well over 90% of tests are negative and the vast majority of positive tests are asymptomatic. This is no longer a medical crisis – it is a political crisis. The government need to do a major U-turn fast. But how can they do it without looking stupid? They should just admit that they panicked locking down the country, that virus is no way near as dangerous as initially feared and that it is time to get back to normal.
@PC: Do the asymptomatic cases not matter so, or are they capable of spreading it and affecting vulnerable people?
@PC: No test is 100%, for almost anything. The tests are designed by scientists to have as small a rate of false results as possible. False positive rate of around 5%, so 50 people from the 1000 cases in the last two weeks. It’s a little unfortunate they would have been told to self isolate for the 14 days due to a false positive but better safe than sorry. The figures of up to 30% false negatives, really depends on how swabs are taken, transported and processed in the lab, are more of a cause for concern than the positives. Although again as true asymptomatic cases represents around 30-40% of cases, you would expect 60%+ of these false negatives to develop symptoms and in doing so get retested. But how long do they spread it before this happens, that’s the worry.
@NotMyIreland: “False positive rate of around 5%”
No, there’s a near Zero False positive rate with RT-PCR testing.
Anyway a 5% false positive rate doesn’t even make sense, it would result in 300 new cases per day out of the 6,000 tests we run (all false positive).
In fact, there’s a near Zero False positive rate with RT-PCR testing except in rare cases of accidental contamination; the CDC’s original test kit (N2 US CDC) and E Charité test suffered from contamination. This was back in February-March as far as I remember and are the two exceptions I know of.
That said, false negatives are an issue, 30% – 10% are false negative and repeated tests or chest CT can help find the cases that are false negative; can happen as the virus may hide in the lungs so its not found in the nose / throat.
“As previously reported [19], we identified probable primer contamination using N2 US CDC and E Charité, which prevented us from further evaluating their sensitivity and specificity. Except for these two assays, no false-positive results were observed when testing a wide range of respiratory viruses, a result consistent with previous studies [5,6,10,11,13,14].”
Nalla, A.K., Casto, A.M., Huang, M.L.W., Perchetti, G.A., Sampoleo, R., Shrestha, L., Wei, Y., Zhu, H., Jerome, K.R. and Greninger, A.L., 2020. Comparative performance of SARS-CoV-2 detection assays using seven different primer-probe sets and one assay kit. Journal of clinical microbiology, 58(6).
@Kevin Lonergan: they have created their own monster by going back to lockdown sttategy, you ask, why have they not incresed testing etc,well, the simple and obvious answer is that if they did then the numbers will naturally rise, forcing them to continue down the clowns road they have had us on for months, the cabinet meetings must look a right shambles in that they all know deep down that not one of them have the B##lls to bang the table and call a halt!!
@Kevin Lonergan: There were 55,000 tests processed over the last 7 days.
Over 1% of the country were tested !!
Hardly a low number
Try 7 days to get the results for my kids..
@James Hayes: As if things are not stressful enough as it is.
Hope all were negative.
@James Hayes: Athletes getting tested finding out a day later brings median lower
@Bain triail aisti: yes thanks Brian, all good.
@SilexFlint: didn’t know that. Would explain slot though..
Obviously not ideal. That said, much of the contact tracing and testing capacity was mothballed for months while cases were low, so it stands to reason that as new capacity is being activated there will be a bit of a lag. Especially given that there are more close contacts per case now than in previous months when the lockdown was most severe. Hopefully the contract tracers, who have been doing Trojan work so far and deserve our support, can get that average back down.
@The Descolada: *contact tracers and testers
@The Descolada: It must be very stressful for all these asymptomatic healthy people waiting nearly 3 days for their results. Everyone needs to cop on – the virus is petering out. They are NOT asymptomatic they are IMMUNE.
@The Descolada: those “testers” present in clinical laboratories are called Medical Scientists. They have working as hard and are as committed as the other frontline sections of our health service. Testing does not occur in those centres. They only take the sample. I wish the media would get it right.
@PC: The real question is are people presymptomatic, meaning they will develop symptoms or are they asymptomatic meaning they won’t. Have not seen any stats in this. Has anyone?
@Sean Oige: Yes from a study of 303 people aged 22-36 in South Korea. Just over 30 percent were asymptomatic on testing. 19% of these then went on to develop symptoms within 16 days of the test.
@NotMyIreland: Thanks.
@TheITGuy: I’m using “testers” as a general term here, incl those who administer the tests, those who analyse them in labs, etc. They are all completely deserving of support and thanks for the hard work they have put in.
I was obviously very lucky. Rang GP about symptoms on Tuesday am and got a call back straight away. Got a text confirming my test the same day (late afternoon). Received the results by 7pm on the Wednesday – thankfully negative.
@Ciara T.: What part of the country was that, I wondering if you get results quicker when located closer to the labs?
@NotMyIreland: I’m in Dublin. Really feel bad for people having to wait a week or so. It’s not acceptable.
Stop lying.
Median is 2.83, I wonder what the average is though? Seems a lot waiting twice that median, and I would imagine 1 day is the minimum, which would lead to the average been higher? This essentially means just over half of our testing and tracing is happening within the 72 hour limit needed for its effectiveness. Explains why we have had trouble controlling the new clusters, with secondary spread a major source of new cases.
@NotMyIreland: Average is 3.8 days
RTE have a decent article with more data mentioned.
55k tests done a week.
So still less than 1% positives.
6 days and still waiting for results. Also waited for 3 days to get the test.
One of our household had a COVID test in Galway a few weeks ago. After repeatedly trying to learn what the results were, following the guidelines, we found out indirectly, five days later, that the swabs had been lost. We then had another test in Castlebar and received the results just over three days later. Fortunately, COVID wasn’t detected. Our experience of the test centres was that they varied in their approaches to data recording and how they took the samples.
@Elizabeth Kirwan: in Galway, have waited 6 days for results, how did you indirectly find out about the loss of the swabs? I’d like to try find out the situation with my own test, in case mine have been lost also.
@Jo Kavanagh: phoned GP
@Elizabeth Kirwan: good idea, thank you!
well done, thats good news
I had a routine test the day before being admitted to the Rotunda. The procedure was really uncomfortable. They put the swab right down to the back of my nose. My eye watered for hours after. I have spoken to other people who have had the test done and they experienced nothing like it. They just had the swab wriggled inside their nose. I wonder are they being done right
Testing is a joke I rang for a test today and they sent me across the city to get tested when there’s a test centre a mile away from me. So ice to get a bus and a dart to the centre no logic what so ever
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