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THE CHIEF CLINICAL Officer in the HSE has said the advice from the Health Protection and Surveillance Centre (HPSC) is “clear” that people travelling to Ireland from a non-Green List country must restrict movements for 14 days.
Colm Henry told the Oireachtas Special Committee on Covid-19 today that a person in this situation must self-isolate “irrespective” of whether they’ve been tested for Covid-19.
At this morning’s committee session, Solidarity-People Before Profit TD Mick Barry asked representatives from the HSE, including Henry and HSE CEO Paul Reid, if EU Commissioner Phil Hogan broke HSE guidelines for not observing 14-day quarantine advice.
Both men spoke generally about the guidelines when asked by Barry.
Yesterday, Hogan released a timeline of his recent visit to Ireland which included attendance at the controversial Oireachtas Golf Society event.
Based in Brussels, Hogan travelled back to Ireland on 31 July. As Belgium is not on the Green List, the public health advice is that you should restrict your movements for 14 days.
Hogan told his superior – European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – that he “adhered to [Covid-19 requirements] at all times” and said he was not required to “self-isolate or quarantine” because he tested negative for Covid-19 after a hospital appointment.
During an interview with RTÉ News yesterday, Hogan said he “self-isolated for the days up to the 5 of August. I was required to go to hospital. I tested negatively for Covid-19, so I was Covid free. My doctor said I was free to go.”
When asked about the HSE advice that people returning from abroad should continue to restrict movements even if they get a negative test in the first 14 days Hogan said: ”Well, I don’t accept that … I did everything possible to ensure that I was no risk to anybody.”
The senior HSE figures today reiterated this advice while at committee.
Henry said the “advice is clear in this regard” and that a person must restrict their movements for 14 days when returning from a non-Green List country “irrespective of a test being performed either abroad or here”.
Committee
During this morning’s session, HSE representatives were pressed on a number of issues on the current situation with Covid-19, including testing and tracing, plans for the winter and the situation in a nursing home in Louth.
In his opening remarks, Reid stressed that the HSE is preparing for the busy winter months ahead.
“There are currently 22 patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19, 6 are in ICU and 3 are currently ventilated,” he said.
“This lower rate of admission may be attributable to the lower age profile of patients that has characterised the resurgence in the disease over the past months. There is no room for complacency, however, and we have plans in place to deal with a surge in hospitalisations.
We are facing into a very difficult period ahead in our health services. In an ideal world the elimination of the virus would make our work somewhat more straightforward. However, this isn’t our reality. We must live with this virus in a very new way, and this requires a carefully balanced approach.
Reid admitted there would be “significant peaks” of the virus, but also “significant troughs” as we live through the virus. He said it was the job of the public health teams to respond to spikes of the cases where they are identified.
On testing and tracing, Reid was pressed by Sinn Féin’s health spokesperson David Cullinane on the previously expressed goal of reaching 100,000 tests a week.
Last week, 55,000 tests for Covid-19 were carried out. The highest recorded in a week came in April with 60,000.
Reid said the goal was to achieve a capacity of 100,000, but how many tests are actually done a week depends on other factors such as the current spread of the disease in the community, and decisions made on whether to conduct serial testing – such as all the staff in meat plants or direct provision.
He also said that serial testing – be they in meat plants or other contexts – comes with a significant cost.
Reid told Social Democrat co-leader Róisín Shortall that serial testing gives the “public a lot of reassurance”. He added that “we need to continue that but it’s a very significant cost”.
At the onset of the crisis, he said that 99,750 healthcare workers were tested with a positivity rate of 0.13%.
He said serial testing was “not the major tool in terms of protecting the public”, and the other public health guidance were of vital importance.
Fine Gael TD Fergus O’Dowd pressed the HSE to provide clarity to the families of those who died at Dealgan House Nursing Home. 23 residents have died at this nursing home since the onset of the pandemic.
He said that the HSE had entered that nursing home, and the families deserved answers as to why. He urged Reid to meet with families to provide the answers they seek.
The HSE CEO said he’d arrange contacts to be made, through local management in the first instance. The HSE Chief Operations Officer Anne O’Connor said that nursing home had issues with staffing levels which prompted action to be taken by the RCSI Hospital group.
Reid separately said that the flu vaccine is a “need-to-have” for healthcare workers this winter. He said other jurisdictions had introduced legislation to make this mandatory but that such a process wouldn’t happen quickly enough here.
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Short answer NO. I’m doing computers in college, 100 in the class, 4 women. And anyway, genders shouldn’t come into play with a shortage
This is what annoys me about feminism. They are demanding equal opportunities and pay which is fair enough. Young women now have very opportunity to do IT but they refuse. How can they then demand equal pay if they don’t have skills with value.?
Also they gossip too much
As someone who has 16 years professional IT experience, I don’t get the demand to incorporate it into schools.
If there are resources to be invested, spend them on getting more kids to do honours maths and at getting those who do it better grades. Working with that background, third-level and industry can turn someone into a decent IT professional.
The big danger with school courses is that they can focus on technologies that will be irrelevant a decade later when the pupil join the work force.
Correct re maths. The minister declared last week that honours maths should be an entry requirement for primary teaching. A bit extreme, I think. But it should certainly be the case for secondary. Commerce, Arts and Science graduates make up the majority of secondary maths teacher. They need to financially incentify maths and engineering graduates to teach. Pay them more.
Brian McCraith of DCU made the point that kids don’t survive IT courses due to lack of grounding in schools. It’s easier to point the finger of blame that to change the way a course is delivered. I think both need to change. I see eastern European kids coming here, who have a competency in basics because of computing subjects in schools, get on better than Irish kids.
I believe all 3 need to change. Better math tuition schools, introduction of IT as a leaving cert subject, and for 3rd level courses to become more sympathetic of the lack of basic understanding of their candidates (don’t just blame schools, work harder with what you’ve got).
Chris, I take your point, but you can currently do a Leaving Cert exam in Hebrew or Classical Studies amongst other obscure subjects and you can still do metalwork at Junior level. Surely there should be room for some IT exam, it would introduce a lot more young people to the idea of Tech as a career as well as a social activity.
Cormac, a huge majority of science graduates have maths in their degrees, especially physics graduates. My degree is physics and maths. They go hand in hand and I’d bet possibly all of the physics graduates who are teaching have maths to degree level. If you want a maths teacher at LC level then hire a maths graduate and not an engineer. If you want someone to teach technology or engineering then hire an engineering graduate. The problem is and you are right about this, is a lot of maths teachers may only have done a year or two of maths at Uni as part of their business or arts degree.
Gary, I said the majority. You are an exception. A physics and maths degree may be closer to or even higher than the level of maths of an engineer. Main stream science and commerce students do maths that is not as high as leaving cert maths and these graduates teach maths in schools.
The point I was making is that the majority of maths teachers are under qualified. Lack a confident understanding.
Every engineer has a high understanding of maths.
Women can do IT but have no interest in it. Men will spend hours tweaking and tinkering with machines just to get a tiny improvement in performance whilst most women don’t even notice a problem with a machine until it comes to a complete halt.
There will always be women who will be the exception and there should not be any barriers to women doing any Job but it has to be recognised lack of women in IT is not a problem for any of us, the same as lack of men in female dominated professions isn’t a problem.
Agreed Nimby . Having taken honors maths & physics for the L .C. I headed off to do computer programming in u.l. but hated it! I just found it so tedious. It’s not that I couldn’t do it I just didn’t like it & switched to teaching which I’ve been doing for 16 yrs now & love every day of it.
NimbY, if you had bothered to actually read the article rather than trOtting out sexist stereotypes, yoU will see that the article sAys that most “of the women woRking in IrEland’s the tech sector “fell into” the career”. Now, maybe, if you’d taken two minutes to reAd this sentenCe and actually notice what it means, you woUld realise that the reason there are so few women in tech is because it is never preseNted to them as a career opTion. It is considered by many to be a “boys subject” or “male career path” and that in itself is a barrier to women having the opportunity to get involved in the profession.
IT courses in colleges in Silicone Valley have 50/50 gender mix. Studies show that kids are influenced by the roll model of their parents. Often both parents work in technology fields there. Time may eventually level it here too as the industry grows.
However the skills shortage in Ireland could be addressed by increasing the intensity of repetitive tuition and revision in college courses for the majority who don’t get coding straight away. A maximum of 20% of any IT class simply get coding very naturally and go on to careers in software. The other 80% struggle, but colleges could do a lot more to make sure those kids get more tutorials at a slower pace until they get the logic too. It’s not that they can’t do it, they just need longer. Coding is always taught at the pace of the fastest kids. So many computer science graduates hate coding because they were left behind during training.
Very true coding ain’t easy but if your determined to master it you will
I have worked in Software for a long time. My partner works in IT as well & we have both spent a fair bit of time on the West coast. There is a big difference between the workplaces here and those in San Francisco & Silicon Valley. The US workplaces are a lot more gender diverse. And it’s not just engineers, there are noticeably more women in Senior Management roles as well. My employer did a software deal with a large bank recently, 20,000 employees, where the CEO, the COO and the CTO were all women. You wouldn’t see that in Ireland I think.
Cornell or one of these other top ranked colleges launched this Blitz to get more female students into Computer Science. It succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations and within a few years the percentage of females on the course had gone from 4% to 45%.
It’s not industry sexism that is the cause of all this , more society’s attitudes. There’s a belief out there amongst parents, teachers and Irish society in general that women & girls should favour the likes of Biology, Home Ec and Primary School Teaching. And not bother their heads with stuff like Engineering or Maths as those are for boys. Load of rubbish of course, especially considering that women do better in Leaving Cert maths and sciences every year.
Where on the West coast were you Paddy, Galway or Mayo ? It’s beautiful over there …
Ha ha! :-) well as it happens I would be a big fan of irelands west coast as well. Beautiful part of the world …
This is sexist nonsense plain and simple…if we have a shortage of skilled IT workers then surely we need to train more kids in IT? I really fail to understand how gender figures in this simple equation.
CTRL ALT DELETE
Ctrl + Shift + Esc
Same thing but one hand ;-)
Ahh a one-handed typist !!!
The skills shortage has nothing to do with woman or the lack there of.
The audit carried out by fastrack to IT ( FIT ) was held in conjunction with employers and found there was a shortage of network engineers. There has since been a plan of action through training put in place that is open to men and women and in my opinion either sex is capable of doing the job once qualified.
I have a degree in IT and a diploma in web design and another in server infrastructure, yet all of these jobs require years of experience. That’s another big problem right there, how can I get experience if you won’t give me any?? And if anyone brings up the job bridge scheme I’ll loose the plot
I work in a large IT company and there are plenty of women there, although mostly sitting in the canteen drinking posy coffee and moaning about discrimination.
I just don’t get IT!
I teach computer systems. .I have one lass in the class.. in my son’s first year..only one class is doing IT..so out 100 students..only 20 will have an understanding…
What a degrading headline.
Yes a generalisation, and probably not as true nowadays as what it used to be BUT:
Women and IT do not mix well
Why do you need a ‘degree’ to work in a call centre?
This explains it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w
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