HSE DIRECTOR PAUL Reid has said that the HSE has bought 700,000 gowns, 1.7 million gloves, over 1 million masks, and 400,000 glove and mask protections.

The HSE page for the coronavirus has received 725,000 impressions on Google, and 307,00 page views. In the last three days alone, the HSE has received 2,000 queries to the HSE Live calls, and 300 of those queries were followed up by the HSE team.

A further 600-700 people have contacted their public health provider about concerns that they have Covid-19 since early January, in over cases it was deemed necessary to carry out 100 tests. Of the 100 plus tests carried out so far, no positive cases have been confirmed.

“Of course it’s possible that somebody in Ireland has [Covid-19], that’s clearly what happened in other countries since it started in China, because that’s how it spread. People came, they may or may not have been symptomatic – so it’s very important to us that people do come forward,” Dr Kevin Kelleher said.

I think historically we had evidence that they didn’t work very well, we may now have evidence that may not be true. This may be one of the things that come out of this process.

“I think when they have been attempted in other countries they haven’t been able to contain them in such a strong way,” he said.

Dr Cillian De Gascun said that “The challenge elsewhere is getting the balance right between the rights of the individual and the of the population.”

Dr Sarah Doyle said that although China’s “draconian” travel ban was effective and did the rest of the world a massive favour, she said that there was “also leakage”. 

“So despite all of those extreme measures, there was still leakage to the rest of the world.”

Since the outbreak of cases in Italy over the weekend, the advice for what to do if you suspect you have Covid-19 has changed.

If someone meets the criteria for getting tested for Covid-19 – someone who has been to an affected reason and are experiencing symptoms – they would call their GP who would confirm that they need to be tested.

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Before the Italy outbreak, that person would be transported to hospital by ambulance – this has changed now, as people need to make their own way to the hospital. 

“If you’re getting one suspect case in a week or a day then an ambulance is fine, but as the definition of affected areas has changed, we’ve seen peaks in activity after the definition changed to mainland China, and after the situation in Italy,” De Gascun said.

As of today, according to the latest toll from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, there have been more than 82,100 Covid-19 infections and 2,800 deaths worldwide.

According to the most extensive study done so far, the novel coronavirus was benign in 80.9% of cases, “serious” in 13.8% and “critical” in 4.7%. The remaining 0.6% was not specified.

Part of the reason Covid-19 been declared a public health emergency is due to the speed at which it has spread compared to other coronaviruses (like Sars and Mers) and the fact that there’s a lot about the disease we still don’t know – including how exactly it’s being transmitted.