The principals of some primary schools are spending weekends contact tracing and arranging Covid-19 testing for families, the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) has said.
The organisation's comments come after it emerged that thousands of close contacts of positive Covid-19 cases will not be contacted by the HSE after the contact tracing system was overwhelmed by cases last weekend.
One school principal described a “completely overwhelmed” system that has meant he must make public health decisions he is “in no way qualified to make”.
“I’ve been left in the invidious position of contacting staff and parents at weekends and at night time, making public health decisions that I’m in no way qualified to make,” Tiernan O'Neill, Principal of Moyross National School in Limerick said.
“The system is completely overwhelmed, and you are dealing with phenomenal people in the public health system, brilliant people, but it’s increasingly obvious that the public health precautions for school communities – they are totally inadequate.”
12,500 adults and children linked to over 500 schools and childcare facilities have so far been tested for Covid-19, with 352 positive cases recorded.
It comes as the Department of Health has defended the decision to keep schools and childcare settings open, while the rest of the country enters lockdown.
Text messages
The HSE is to send a text message today asking between 2,000 to 2,500 confirmed cases - who have already been informed by text of their infection - to tell their own close contacts to immediately seek a Covid-19 test, according to the Irish Times.
The move to encourage patients with Covid-19 to call their own contacts due to the overwhelmed system was "disappointing," but it was the right thing to do, the chair of Nphet's modelling group Professor Philip Nolan has said.
The HSE had tried to enhance the contact tracing system and they need to continue to do that so the system will be better prepared, he told Newstalk Breakfast. “A huge amount of this was done during the summer,” he said.
Contact tracers faced an unprecedented number of confirmed cases last weekend, resulting in a backlog of cases over a three day period from Friday to Sunday.
Normally, contact tracers call newly-infected people to ask for their close contacts and then call those close contacts to arrange for them to be tested in order to stem transmission of the disease. The decision was taken to not contact the infected people for their close contacts over fears it would lead to a delay of days in contact tracing.
The HSE instead decided to focus on tracing the contacts of Monday’s cases, to avoid a backlog amid the continuing high number of cases being reported daily.
