Go to every week that we reported tests completed and look at us relatively speaking.
Varadkar said on March 23rd that we were trying to replicate South Korea. At that stage they had 6,700 tests completed per million and we had c 6,200. We were not far behind at that point. SK now has 10,000 per million completed and we have nearly 15k.
I wouldn’t call that an abject failure by any means. Even if you strip out the “German” tests we’d still be ahead of them.
It’s bizarre to me that people are criticising them for seeking alternative labs when there are resource pinch points.
Nobody, anywhere on this thread has criticised them for that. Why are you making things up? Is it so you can win an argument against imaginary points that haven’t been made? Bizarre
Just because you have more microbiology labs per capita doesn’t mean you can do more COVID-19 testing ffs. It’s like saying because you have more telescopes you can send more people to the moon. The equipment needed for a COVID-19 type test is highly specialized, as are the reagents, etc. Once you have the equipment and the staff trained to use it, you should be able to scale up quickly as they run hundreds of tests at a time.
Up to 21 days turn around in getting results seems like a failure and it seems contact tracing wasn’t performed until a positive result. At which point it’s pointless
They went with a strategy that they had no capacity for, which you’ve already agreed was a bad idea
We had more capability and more capacity than Germany, before this according to the experts. I know you’ve declared yourself an expert so include yourself amongst them but still. It’s very simple, especially for an expert like yourself.
Fire up the source that says Ireland had more capability and capacity than Germany to do COVID-19 testing… and I’m not an expert, but I’m a lot closer to one than you are.
They were running 1,500 tests a day, very early on in the process. On Saturday they ran 1,600 in Ireland. Hardly a resounding success.
Maybe the reason they started so well, is actually relatively, we were in a strong position lab wise etc, as I’ve outlined above. Which seems to really have upset some of ye for some reason
Since then we’ve made no progress on our testing rates. We are supposed to be at 15,000, we are just over 1,500. An abject failure.
Because every person with a wild ailment in the country was looking for one, around 20k per day at one point, so they have lots of swabs.
I don’t think it has been fantastic by any means, but abject failure is a bit much. I’d have other criticisms to yours including a lack of daily updates on completed tests.
But go to every single week on reported cases for Ireland and compare to other countries. The weekly efforts were not that bad, not by any stretch of the imagination.
I pointed out repeatedly on here when yourself and other lads were going on about us being 2 weeks behind Italy to look at the relative testing at those points and us.
