Professor Anthony Staines:

There are two other pieces in this. There are a number of objections posed to this is a policy, the most fundamental being that all of the pieces that are used to make it happen are imperfect. One of the central messages of public health is that if one does things which are in themselves imperfect but one does several of them, one can get really good results. There is also a great concern about further damage to the economy, which I believe Mr. O’Brien will address in a little while. We simply make the point that the limited evidence that is available, which is from the United States where every conceivable variety of lockdown has been tried and from South Korea where no lockdown was tried, is that the economic damage in a region of those countries was much more strongly related to the amount of infection. It really is the virus that drives the economic damage. This is the same as the message that comes from analysis of the 1918-19 flu.

The logic of the green zones is that there are many areas of the country where there are very few cases and these are mostly rural counties.

Roscommon is a good example. In those areas, it is relatively straightforward to stop the disease completely. As one gets areas to green, one can merge those areas and produce a larger and larger green area which covers the country. That is the position we were in in early June and we can absolutely get back to that position again because we have already done it. One goes from managing one outbreak which is spreading across the country, affecting many different counties, to 26 smaller outbreaks, many of which are tiny and involve single families or individuals and can be dealt with effectively and stopped from spreading effectively. In the areas in which infection is driven to zero, in green zones, which would initially be county-level areas, life can return substantially to normal. The price of that is no non-essential travel into those areas from other parts of the country. The plan is to expand those areas as quickly as possible to cover the entire country, hopefully in collaboration with the Northern Ireland Government, where there is a long history of co-operation, to extend it to cover the entire island.

It is the view of colleagues of ours who have dealt with epidemics of things like Ebola, malaria and cholera in the most difficult circumstances imaginable that this is entirely feasible. It is also a view supported by the evidence from other countries. One gets to the situation in New Zealand. In New Zealand, there has been an outbreak in the past two days which appears to have been caused by failure in the quarantine in one city. In that city, life is severely disrupted but the outbreak will be brought under control and life and business continue on the rest of the island. We are bringing our children back to school in September and it is crucially important that we do so. All the international evidence says that the lower the amount of this virus circulating in our communities, the safer it is for our children to return to school.

The alternative of living with the virus is difficult, as the people of Kildare, Laois and Offaly have discovered in the past week or so. Our expectation is that if we continue to live with the virus, such outbreaks, with rolling closures, will be a feature of life until a vaccine is available. It will be the middle of next year, June 2021 at the earliest if everything goes well, before large supplies of a vaccine are available for our population. If things do not go well, it could be a lot longer and we could be waiting for quite some time for a vaccine.