936,280 tests completed in 6 months.

To put that into some context, that's the equivalent of 70 years worth of Flu tests in Ireland.

The scale of it is lost at times but it was a massive logistical challenge and superhuman effort to-date but they need more help. https://twitter.com/IrishTimes/status/1304045217532633088

When you look at severe flu seasons like 2018 or 2011, you see these sorts of numbers:

2017-18 flu season:

Tests: 17,692
Positives: 4,382
Negativity rate: 75.2%

That's a fairly severe season, typically you see around 12,000 tests, with RT-PCR accounting for most of that.

So you're looking at medical scientists having 120 test per day workload for Influenza most years turned into a 12,000 test per day workload for Covid.

And of course there's the separate but equally challenging logistics in sampling centers, between swabbers, couriers etc.

It's not like they can find 1,000 volunteers to work in labs. It's a highly specialized discipline, it was under-staffed pre-pandemic and remains so today.

When you hear talk of a crunch in capacity, what they actually mean is we have a finite amount of people doing trojan work.

It doesn't matter what the theoretical capacity in the labs is when the number of people capable of performing the testing is finite.

There's 24 hours in a day, they need to sleep and eat, and that's on the back of the hardest 6 months of their careers.

They deserve so much praise, support and encouragement.

But me writing nice things on Twitter or people clapping isn't going to help, that's something Government has to do by sitting down with them and asking what do they need.

And give it to them.