Covid-19: ‘substantial risk’ linked to international travel, says Holohan

There is a "substantial risk associated with international travel" at the moment, chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan has told the Oireachtas transport committee today.

He told the committee Irish experts consider that if testing of passengers is introduced, it would still be “efficient” to mandate a five-to-seven day period of restricted movement, with a symptom check on day five.

However, Dr Holohan warned this approach can still miss up to 15 per cent of imported cases.

In his opening statement, Dr Holohan told the committee that current efforts are focused "very much on suppressing the spread of the disease domestically" and that once the disease is back under control in Ireland, "it will be necessary to manage very carefully the risks of importation".

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Dr Holohan said once there is sustained low levels of domestic transmission, “the relative impact of imported cases is all the greater”, and pointed to data showing that at times during the summer travel-related cases accounted for around a quarter of cases.

He said international travel “will represent a prominent area of risk as the disease comes under control nationally, and we subsequently aim to maintain suppressed disease activity and low incidence rates”.

With the Government set to decide on how an EU agreement on a common approach to travel will be implemented, Dr Holohan told the committee such agreed strategies will be an “important step” as countries move from emergency management of the disease to longer-term strategies.

In doing so, it will be important that countries adopt approaches that facilitate travel “while ensuring that those who need to travel are not posing an additional risk to the wider populace”.

He told the committee that even when PCR testing – the more expensive and precise form of Covid testing favoured by health chiefs – is used as part of a travel regime, it is usually done so in tandem with other measures such as travel bans, mandatory quarantines and border closures.

Dr Holohan repeated recent findings by Hiqa that rapid antigen tests “are not suitable for use in screening asymptomatic people with unknown levels of disease, such as arriving passengers”.

He told the committee that although long term travel restrictions are difficult, "we need only to look to the travel policies of countries that have achieved sustained low rates of transmission, particularly countries in Asia, to see the importance of controlling importations".