Professor Paddy Mallon:

To clarify, the point on the prolonged recovery period comes from my clinical experience, which has predominantly been in dealing with healthcare workers. I have no comparator group. There is, however, a much more prolonged period of recovery than would ever be expected for people with a mild initial infection. That is what we do not know.

In the context of the footprint, I completely agree with the analogy of the square peg in a round hole. To give an example of how relatively understaffed we are, this morning I compared our gross domestic product with that of Norway. Ours is approximately 30% lower than Norway's. Norway has more than 100 infectious diseases specialists for a population not dissimilar to that of Ireland. We have fewer than 20. I am sure it would be the same for every single medical specialty including nursing and for intensive care unit capacity. We got away by the skin of our teeth largely due to the biggest non-pharmaceutical intervention the country has ever taken, which was mediated by the public. We did not get away with this because of the capacity in our healthcare system.

To ask our healthcare system and the people within that system to do again what they have done over the past three months would be similar to asking the population to undergo the three-month lockdown again. There needs to be a recognition, going forward, that we cannot operate safely with the current footprint and current staffing levels.