Professor Philip Nolan:

It never was mitigation. It was suppression. One of the questions that needs to be asked about the letter that is alluded to is what is the difference really between the stated strategy, which is to keep numbers at a very low level, and this somewhat more ambitious strategy to eliminate it? When talking about eliminating, in other words going from five, six, seven or ten cases a day to zero cases, one must think of the cost of that versus the benefits and ask what it would really buy us.

When we get to zero cases a day and the rest of the world is at some modest number of cases per day, how does one then prevent a resurgence of the virus? Do we completely, hermetically seal the country?

A different strategy is to suppress the virus to very low levels and then engage with our European Union colleagues to see how all of Europe is going to suppress the virus to very low levels. Some countries that have had enormous outbreaks have succeeded in bringing the disease under control and some countries with modest outbreaks have succeeded in bringing the disease to very low levels. While New Zealand is an island of 4 million people, from a geospatial perspective it is utterly distinct from the island of Ireland. The strategy in New Zealand was fine for New Zealand but it may not be the optimum strategy for Ireland. I come back to my fundamental point.