New testing system for travel into Ireland 'won't protect the country'
The new requirement that people coming into Ireland from overseas must show evidence of a negative Covid test has the appearance of "window-dressing" according to a leading virus expert from Athlone.
Dr Gerald Barry, of the School of Veterinary Medicine at UCD, was critical of the new system when interviewed about it on RTE's Morning Ireland this morning.
He said the desire to stem the spread of the new Omicron variant of Covid-19 until more information was known about it was understandable. However, he asserted that the new testing requirement for people coming into the country was entirely unfit for that task.
"A once-off antigen test 48 hours before getting a flight does nothing to protect the country against this variant," he said.
"If anybody that implemented this thinks it's a good idea, or thinks it will have any impact at all on reducing variant cases coming into the country, well, the science unfortunately would completely disagree with them.
"Antigen tests are really good at picking up highly infectious people, but if you get a negative on an antigen test 48 hours before a flight, that tells you nothing about how infectious you are getting on the flight.
"It actually tells you very little about whether you are actually even infected getting on the flight.... It's basically completely pointless."
He said that in order for antigen testing to be truly effective in this scenario, it would have to be done "just before you get on a flight, just after you arrive in Dublin, and for a period of maybe five days, every day," after that.
Dr Barry, a former Marist College pupil who grew up in Retreat Park and Barrymore, said the evidence for using PCR testing was stronger.
Nevertheless, he added that mandatory hotel quarantine had previously been introduced because "a PCR test 72 hours beforehand does not pick up all the cases we want to pick up."
He said the tests that people coming into Ireland will have to take "might pick up a few cases" but would not succeed in stopping or dramatically reducing the number of infected people coming into the country.
"It just looks like a bit of window-dressing, to be honest. It looks like something they've brought in, to an extent like a box-ticking exercise. It's not really going to have the impact that they're suggesting it's going to have."
Dr Barry said he would prefer to see the country "dramatically ramping up our testing and tracing system, so that when we do detect cases (of the new variant) we can very rapidly clamp down on those cases, and stop it becoming more of an issue than it already potentially is."
The first confirmed case of the Omicron variant in Ireland was announced earlier today.
Dr Barry said it was likely that there were a number of undetected cases of the variant here.
"We're only sequencing about 10% of our cases currently, so there's probably lots of cases in the country that we don't know about," he said this morning.