Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said there will be delays in Covid-19 tests and results in the coming weeks.
Speaking in Dublin on Wednesday, Mr Varadkar told reporters he understands the anxiety and worry of people waiting for tests and results.
He said: “The current cause of delay is a shortage of reagents. We hope to address that but then there may be a shortage of something else. We have to be honest about that – we will hit delays.
“There is no handbook or roadmap for dealing with this. Everyone across health service is pulling out all the stops. We are going to run into issues. Every country is looking for kits, reagents, ventilators.”
Mr Varadkar added that Ireland is doing “a lot of tests” for Covid-19.
He said: “In Ireland we’ve decided as a country, to do a lot of tests. We’re in the top tier of countries in the world when it comes to number of tests we’re doing. That’s the right thing to do in terms of containing the virus.
“But we are running into difficulties and we need to be honest with people and frank about that. There is a global shortage to testing kits, there’s a shortage of reagents, and we also need the laboratory capacity.
“So we are going to have bumps in the road where there are delays at particular points in time. We’ll do everything we can, working with international partners and companies to make sure that we continue to maximize the number of tests that we do and we prioritize people working in healthcare facilities, in particular, as well as those who are sick.
“But it is important to bear in mind, getting your test results in itself doesn’t actually determine whether or not you get any better. This is a virus that has no treatment.
“So the fact that somebody is delayed in getting their test results doesn’t actually determine in any way when they get better or not, but it does help us to identify more cases and do more tracing.
“One of the things we decided to do and that was actually yesterday is actually to step up contact tracing considerably because we have 14 people now working on contact tracing.
“That’s going to help to make up in some way for the fact that there are delays in getting the test results.”