A clue as to the significant role of travel in 2nd wave as this variant emerged in Spain in June but now accounts for 60% of cases here. Every one of those cases is thus part of a chain to travel from Spain rather than virus circulating here pre June /1 https://www.ft.com/content/2782655a-0441-4d38-bb03-5c4e67ead110

This isn’t to say all or most could have been intercepted at Dublin airport. It could be someone working in London brought it on a visit home to Belfast & it crossed the border. But risk takers who took Spanish holidays were probably risk takers on returning home /2

We do have at least one example of this although we don’t know where this couple had gone on their ‘trip away’ that then resulted in a large amount being infected on their return /3

I did a thread on travel back in June using detection data from countries that were doing serious testing & quarantine - with R above 1 from late June every inbound case was going to raise the level in the 14 day incidence bucket going forward to Oct 5th /4 https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1278280551212990465

Excuse about total detected travel cases only being 2% is both true & misleading. People later caught in chains of infection of this variant would probably not have been otherwise infected. Incidence is low enough that two variants ‘fighting it out’ to infect cannot be common /6

The ‘measures’ taken here around travel were largely about pretending to do something. The locator forms were no more than a reminder to be sound, risk takers were going to ignore that request, people who isolated probably would have anyway, tourists were clearly not going to /7

It’s hard to massively reduce this problem without huge effort on an all island basis. Iceland had a quarantine with day 0 & day 7 test which is probably the only way short of full 14 day NZ or China quarantine to catch almost all incoming cases but we have huge travel volume /8

Current Eamonn Ryan talk about a single arrival / departure test doesn’t seem to understand the basis of the virus as that would miss a very large percentage (40%) of cases. Perhaps better than useless in detecting some but also with the risk expressed by ‘not detected’ /9

Solutions are hard to see here. 'Close the ports' is pointless with it being on an all island basis & given the number of migrant workers here & the number of Irish migrant workers elsewhere not sustainable except for very short periods /10

For the same reason compulsory hotel quarantine like New Zealand or China might demand more hotel rooms than we have. Although it might not, its introduction would drastically reduce the amount of travel & all but eliminate tourist travel /11

But these problems can't be used - as the government has used them - as an excuse to do nothing. Even halving inward cases could make a big difference in delaying 3rd wave if Lv5 gets us back to 50 cases a day while the virus is still running rampage across most of Europe /12

I went back to look at the Icelandic data and it turns out its useful for giving us some idea of how risky a single point in time test of arrivals would actually be. In practise it missed a lot of cases picked up at second day 6/7 testing https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1321764852076072963?s=20