Mr. Éamonn Donnelly:

In addition to what is in the statement, one of the key points we want to emphasise is that it is not just about the disproportionately large infection rates among healthcare workers, it is about the effect that has across the workforce in the health sector. We hope we will move from a world where we were dealing only with the response to the pandemic into what the HSE calls a co-Covid environment, where we are living with the disease and reopening health services that people need to access. We cannot keep health services shut down forever. What that means is that as community-led health services reopen, the people who have already been working in direct response to the pandemic, and to whom my colleague, Ms Keogh, referred, go back to substantive roles in the community. The example I cite in the statement is of a physiotherapist who will now have to resume treatment with somebody whose mobility has deteriorated alarmingly in the four months since the Covid response started.