Professor Anthony Staines:

Briefly, in terms of outcomes, there is increasing and increasingly-worrying evidence that this is not a benign disease in young people. It is absolutely true they seldom die, but death is not the only adverse outcome from an infection. We do not yet know, because this virus was really only identified in January of this year, how common these long-term effects are. We do not know how severe they are. We know from many other conditions - if this is the case for Covid the same will hold true - that the long-term effects of illness cost far more than the short-term effects. Somebody dying is a tragedy, but it is a cheap tragedy. It is a low-cost tragedy. Quite a number of people are left relatively disabled for a long period of time. We do not yet know how many. We do not yet have reliable figures.

Quite a number of people are left relatively disabled for a long periods of time after this illness and the cost of those people is enormously higher than the cost of either acute healthcare or the mortality which, as Professor Heneghan and Mr. O'Brien correctly observe, is heavily concentrated in the oldest segment in the population.