Professor Philip Nolan:

I will comment on the question regarding seroprevalence and Dr. Glynn will address the issues of pubs and the long-term sequelae. An excellent seroprevalence study has been carried out. It shows an overall prevalence of antibodies of approximately 1.7%. The prevalence is higher in Dublin, which was the epicentre of the original pandemic, at approximately 3%, and lower in Sligo, at 0.6%. The study shows two things. It shows that very few people in this country have been infected with the virus and, as such, there is no level of immunity to protect us, which is why we are utterly reliant on the public health measures to protect us through the winter and into next year. The second thing it shows is that our modelling and surveillance system is excellent and that we picked up one in three cases all the way through the pandemic. Allowing for the fact that half of those cases will be asymptomatic, that is what we would have predicted in our most optimistic estimation of how good our surveillance system would be.

With regard to the earlier discussion, we need to remember that we are talking about large numbers but that we also need to think about the small numbers and we need to think about our reproduction number. With regard to all individual cases, whether the person in question is a spectator at a match or goes to a restaurant, if that person infects more than one other person, we are in long-term trouble. The whole objective of what may seem like disproportionate measures to prevent people congregating is literally to prevent that situation occurring in the context of all those separate individuals in their households. We need to keep our national reproduction number below one. Sadly, the only way to do that is to reduce people's level of social mixing such that they only attend the things that are priorities and do not engage in things that are not priorities.