Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Dr. De Gascun and Professor Nolan. I thank them for attending and for their ongoing work. I know they have both been very busy in different ways supporting the work of the National Public Health Emergency Team, the Department and the various healthcare officials working on our response.

I would like to get the response of the witnesses to the open letter to Government signed by more than 1,000 scientists in Ireland, which was published yesterday. I am sure they have both read the letter. It states: "Our current policy is to live with the virus under a long-term mitigation strategy, with the risk of future surges and lockdowns until when, or if, a vaccine becomes available." We have all heard scientists over the last number of weeks, including microbiologists, immunologists and virologists saying that under the current approach a second wave of this virus is highly likely and some say it is inevitable. If a second wave comes we are looking at closing the schools down again, possibly in the same month that they open. We are looking at businesses being closed down. We are looking at very serious restrictions on people's civil liberties. We would be looking at the almost complete shutdown of the healthcare system for a second time. Given the starkness of their warning, that more than 1,000 scientists have signed the letter, if they are right we need to do things differently. In the expert opinion of the witnesses are they right? Is the strategy to live with the virus, albeit at a suppressed level, accepting that there is a decent chance that there will be a second wave, and we have all lived through what happens when a wave of this virus arrives, right?