A leading public health expert says Irish officials should publish a list of approved antigen tests so people can have confidence they're reliable.
The National Public Health Emergency team broke with its longstanding opposition to their USE earlier this week.
Elevated infection rates have continued, with 4,642 more confirmed cases yesterday.
People going regularly to pubs, nightclubs and restaurants have been urged to use an antigen kit twice a week.
Professor Anthony Staines from DCU says the state should start supplying them, like in the UK and Germany:
I think there needs to be fairly tight regulation to where Antigen tests get sold, because we know from work in the United Kingdom and the United States that there are quite a lot of antigen tests on the market that are completely inadequate. So it really is about getting antigen tests that work because there's no point getting ones that don't. The cost of this pandemic on our economy is enormous, subsidising antigen tests is neither here nor there."
