Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I too thank our guests. I have three questions. The witnesses might come back to me in writing and I would appreciate that. Dr. McConkey previously spoke about saliva testing. I believe it is precise. Is it faster and does it give fewer false negatives or false positives? I believe that at present, we have a positivity rate of just 2% or 3%. Testing is expensive. I am not saying that we should not test but are we being clear about the symptoms? I know that GPs and out-of-hours services are overwhelmed with calls about Covid symptoms. Half of the schools have children missing while waiting for test results or for advice. Do the witnesses think that we need to look at what we are saying are symptoms and test those while also testing all close contacts in the case of an outbreak? I am aware that we are one of very few countries testing in this way after a positive case.

I am not sure that we can continue to test at this level with this level of negative results. People will tire and perhaps not go for tests, or we will run out of capacity. It seems inefficient to test so many with such a low positive rate. I know that we have to think about those without symptoms, but that is not what we are seeing being referred in the main. What do the witnesses think is a way around that?

This has a significant impact on mental health. I worry with the winter and the darker evenings coming, which can be dreary enough in itself. I worry about what will happen in future. We see cases rising in Sweden where there is no lockdown as we know it. We also see the older population becoming infected. If we lived with this virus and let it run, how would we protect our older population? Can we make our own pods in our lives? For example, if there are three houses on a street, with one person living alone, a family, and a newly-wedded couple, can they call themselves a household and cocoon themselves, operating like a pod? We need to do that with the evenings and what is happening. We need to look at pods. People might have seen the Irish Open where players are associating with staff and they circulate as a pod. We see it with movie sets and with various sectors starting to use pods. Can it work? Could it be the thing that minds our mental health - allowing social contact but keeping us protected by keeping us in small pods? I am particularly concerned by the messaging to the older population, with the prospect of going back indoors and the worry about that.

Information and how we communicate are crucial. We have to live with this virus and it does not know whether one is young or old. We need a roadmap of how to look after our elderly. Communities will play the biggest role here, with people in pods watching out for their neighbours. I thank the witnesses. We have many challenges ahead. We have to mind ourselves and our neighbours. We all have to keep our distance and wash our hands. We all have a personal responsibility because the figures are going up. We need to work on that more. From my own clinics and work with people, I feel that we need to give more information about how to look after communities and workplaces. We can work on this and will sort it, but there is more that we can do.