Professor Philip Nolan:

It is probable that at some point in the future the incidence of this disease will increase again in Irish society. How big that increase will be, when it will happen and how difficult it will be to manage are very hard to predict. There is something I can tell the Deputy, which is one output of a modelling study. If we had changed our regime on 18 May and the reproduction number on that date had increased to 1.6, we would have been looking at approximately 500 cases by the 19th.