Dr. Cillian De Gascun:

From a NPHET perspective, my recollection is that the vulnerable persons subgroup was established in early March and would have been working across Government with the various organisations and agencies to implement plans for nursing homes and other vulnerable groups. Speaking from a virology perspective, and Professor Nolan has alluded to this, the virus tends to cause the symptoms it needs in order to transmit. That is what the virus wants to do. For example, chickenpox causes lesions that are full of virus. We typically associate this kind of situation with symptomatic transmission. We have learned recently that the elderly may be asymptomatic or may have atypical symptoms. People will remember the fever, cough and shortness of breath that came out from China, and the WHO mission report to China gave us our first real insight into what this disease looked like. What is interesting, from a virology or medical perspective, is that the disease we are seeing now seems to have evolved and appears slightly different to the classical presentation in China. That made it more challenging to control outbreaks in certain situations. Ultimately, in order to protect the most vulnerable we had to suppress virus transmission in the community and I think we have been very successful in doing that.