Professor Philip Nolan:

We are part of an island nation with a high population density. Our original epidemic was seeded by travel. It would be worth our while to look at the population density map of Europe and see how different Ireland is from much larger European countries and the potential of the disease to spread very quickly from one outbreak in one part of the country very rapidly to all of the parts of the country. That is why counties that may be green for weeks on end can suddenly turn red because of an outbreak in another part of the country.

I can confirm, from our analysis and the analysis provided by Dr. Glynn and others, two reasons why we are seeing fewer hospitalisations.

One is that we are detecting more cases that we would have missed in the past. Asymptomatic cases that would not have come to our attention in the past are now being tracked, traced and isolated. They are very unlikely to be admitted to hospital. Going back to the early stage of the pandemic, however, people aged between 20 and 39 had between a 2% and 5% chance of being hospitalised, and every second person aged between 70 and 80 was hospitalised. We also know-----