The changes will be phased in from next week.
Dr Tony Holohan, the Chief Medical Officer, tonight announced that the testing criteria for suspected cases of Covid-19 will be changed from early next week.
At the daily press briefing at the Department of Health, it was announced that
37 more people have died from Covid-19 in the Republic of Ireland and 577 new cases have been confirmed here. The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has also been notified of 185 probable deaths from the virus.
At the outbreak of the epidemic here, only patients showing symptoms and who had travelled to China or Italy were sent for testing. This was then expanded, and anyone showing symptoms of the virus (a fever, recent onset of cough and shortness of breath) could avail of a test. However, this led to a huge demand for testing here in the Republic, and a massive backlog of tests resulted in the criteria being largely restricted to those in priority groups and healthcare workers.
Speaking this evening, Dr Holohan outlined the challenges faced during that period; "There will have been a lot of people who came forward looking for testing who we believe probably didn't have symptoms. The positivity rate at the time was very low, 1% maybe 2%, 3% during that period of time.
"We were testing a lot of people with a really low probability of having the infection. And the numbers coming through when we made that change (to wider criteria) were something of the order of maybe 15,000+ per day."
From early next week, the plan is to make tests available to anyone who shows any of those three symptoms; fever, shortness of breath or a cough. Healthcare workers and those in
vulnerable or at-risk groups will still be prioritised; "we're going to change the case definition now in the clinical component, keep the prioritisation criteria. It will increase the rate of testing, and that's what we want.
"But we think we should be able to do that within the available capacity that the HSE has got in place now, both in terms of the capacity to take the sample and to test it in the laboratory."
Dr Holohan again urged the public to continue following the lockdown measures in place until 5 May and reiterated that if the decision was being taken today on whether the restrictions should be lifted, they would not be advising that course of action.
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