Professor Patricia Kearney:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak today and good afternoon to everybody.

I will start by outlining the three reasons we are advocating for a zero-Covid island strategy. The first, of which the committee will be aware but it is important to reiterate what we know and what we do not know, is that Covid-19 is a serious and scary disease. We heard this morning that workers in meat packing factories are petrified about going to work and that Covid-19 causes death and disability. There is increasing emerging evidence of the long-term consequences, the so-called "long Covid".

Second, we know that we can stop the virus. There is evidence from different parts of the world where suppression strategies and going on to elimination have been successful. We also know that closer to home, Ireland’s response to Covid-19 early on was very effective. We saw that due to our efforts as a people, we avoided swamping our health service with the so-called surge and worked together to suppress the curve. The problem and challenge that we are facing now is that, more recently, the policy has become one of suppression of the virus to a so-called tolerable level. This is the idea of living with the virus. The challenge with that is that we are always seven to ten days behind the virus in our response. While we saw the success of the efforts that we made together and the declining number of cases, we have seen more recently how quickly that can change. The rising number of cases over the past few weeks has focused minds on where we go next.

The third reason we are here advocating for a zero-Covid island strategy is that we need clear and decisive action. We need our population to understand the goal that we are all working towards together and what we need to do to get there. We have seen that the Irish population can work to flatten the curve and we now need to work together to stop the curve.

I will explain what we mean by our zero-Covid island strategy. We are defining this as the absence for a suitable period of time of community transmission of SARS-CoV-2. How do we get there? We need leadership and we need our Government to be clear that will take a policy of elimination. The types of measures that we will need to take as a population are those that we are becoming increasingly familiar with. These are strong adherence to hand hygiene and cough etiquette with regular hand washing, being really consistent with our physical distancing, the widespread use of masks, especially indoors, and we need to have more active case finding, testing, tracing, and better support for isolation. We are also advocating that there will be no non-essential travel into what we are calling green zones. This is an approach which we will take within the island which my colleague, Professor Anthony Staines, will describe in more detail. We are also advocating for no non-essential foreign travel with testing, isolation and tracking the movements of incoming people at ports and airports. The reason for this is that we will have a shared goal and work together to support the recovery of our economy and society. Professor Staines will now give some more detail on the green zone.