Professor Patricia Kearney:

I will take the Deputy's question on what is different about the zero-Covid strategy first. I suppose it comes back to the distinction made by Professor Michie between eradication versus elimination versus suppression. To be clear, eradication, which Professor Heneghan spoke about, is when the virus is gone completely from the world. That is not what we are proposing. Elimination, which we are talking about, involves eliminating community transmission. We understand that there is still the possibility that people will cross our borders and come in but we would have appropriate measures in place so that if a person who is Covid-positive comes in, we can detect that, he or she can be isolated and we can avoid any further transmission of the virus. That, essentially, is an elimination strategy. We eliminate community transmission. What we have in Ireland at the moment is suppression. That made sense early on when we were still learning about this disease and when the focus was very much on not overwhelming our health system. It was also informed by responses, for example, to flu outbreaks. It was very much about trying to flatten the curve. What we have learned, and what is very clear in our experience in Ireland in the past few weeks, is that this virus will bounce back if given the opportunity to do so. We need to go that bit further beyond suppression to elimination.