Dr. Kevin Kelleher:

I will quickly introduce the people around the table. They are: Mr. Liam Woods, national director of acute hospitals; Dr. Lynda Sisson, chief occupational physician, who works in the HR department as well as carrying out clinical work; Ms Anne Marie Hoey, national director of HR; Dr. John Cuddihy, director of the HPSC; and Dr. Lorraine Doherty, national clinical director for health protection.

As Mr. Woods and the Chairman said, the committee has received our submission, so we will not make any comments on it. I will, however, make a few opening comments. As an organisation, we take very seriously our responsibility to safeguard all our staff and all our patient clientele. That is a fundamental aspect of our role as an organisation. Clearly, the people around this table are intimately involved in that.

We cannot express our gratitude to, and pride in, all the staff in the health system and those who have joined from outside for how they have performed over recent months. They have worked way beyond what anybody could have expected. They have put in days and weeks of immense work in dealing with this problem for the people of Ireland. As members will be aware, we have come out of it fairly well compared with a number of other countries. Our number of cases is proportionately much lower than in other places. Somebody told me today that Idaho in the US, which has a population of 1.5 million, is seeing 1,000 cases a day.

At the moment, they are seeing 1,000 cases a day, which would be the equivalent of 3,000 to 4,000 cases a day here. We never went anywhere near that sort of number. We are immensely proud of the ICU nurses, the doctors in emergency departments, the doctor and nurses in primary care and the people who have moved from their jobs to work in other roles as part of the response. They have made immense contributions. Finally, I thank the public health staff, who have been going since very early in January and are still going at this quite hard, and especially our colleagues here in Dublin, which has been the main centre of it, so it has hit hardest on people in Dublin. We are very proud of everybody and we aim, as ever, to try and help them to work in whatever way we can. We are ready to take questions.