Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank Dr. Holohan for his ongoing work. I have three questions for him. They concern the basis and rationale for decision-making and the need to be much more transparent about decision-making, not least to keep the public and everybody else with him. We are quite different from other countries in that we do not release much of the data, make the data open source or explain as we go along. For example, when the decision was taken to open schools in Denmark, a full risk assessment was done and the outcome published, so everybody knew that the R-nought number was likely to go up a small bit, as it did before coming back down again. Everybody bought in to the decision to reopen Danish schools. I am not specifically talking about schools but the need for very robust risk assessment and to be very open and transparent about it. What expertise and tools are available to NPHET to risk assess all of the major decisions that are being made?

The R-nought number currently stands at around 0.5. That is very hard to understand given the profile of the people who have been tested in recent times. In the main, they are people who had a lot of contacts and therefore, presumably, there was a lot of transmission. On what is the R-nought number based? Is it based on a theoretical model and, if so, can the model be published?

Dr. Holohan has talked a great deal about the need to understand the behaviour of the virus. What is his current estimate of the prevalence of the virus in the community? It is very hard to understand that. Last night, the figure for new cases was 88. It is fantastic that it has fallen so low. If 88 cases represent a 3% positive testing rate, the total number of people whose results we got yesterday was less than 3,000. That figure does not sit logically with the approach of needing to do 15,000 tests per day. How does Dr. Holohan explain what appears to be a disconnect there?