Dr. Ronan Glynn:

The positivity rate is a sensitive metric. It is difficult to compare positivity rates here with positivity rates internationally simply because our approach to testing is different from approaches internationally. We use this rate and the national positivity rate is less than 3%. There are some areas of the country where it is over 5% at the moment, for example, in Dublin, Monaghan and Donegal. Again, it depends on the number of tests being done. I am sure we will come back to this issue again later but there is no one metric that supersedes all others. If there was one metric, such as the 14-day incidence rate, that superseded all others, we probably would have gone further in relation to Louth in recent days. We did not do so because we had other information about the nature of the cases in the county and we felt we could wait to see if the position improved, which it did. The position was similar with regard to Waterford, Limerick, and Tipperary. We simply cannot boil this down to one metric or one set of metrics at a point in time. If we could, there would be no need for NPHET.