Dr. Tony Holohan:

That is fair. Across many of those countries, there are substantial challenges in providing health services. Countries are literally seeking to buy ICU capacity from other countries.

Desperate measures are being taken in many developed European countries and capitals. I will not make a bold statement that we will avoid that here but the trajectory of the disease we have managed to establish over the course of the past couple of weeks, gives us some reason to believe we might get there.

The reason I am simply disagreeing is that a couple of things happened. First, we know we have had anticipatory behaviour. The population has been getting more concerned. Individuals, and rightly so, and we have been advising it, have taken decisions themselves to avoid risks and to start to cut down their contacts and cut down their socialisation to avoid the kinds of circumstances that would lead to transmission. That has been going on for some time. Second, we have evidence in places where level 3 recommendations have been in place for longer than in other parts of the country, in particular, in Dublin, where we have not seen a suppressing effect in disease transmission. All the evidence we have available gives us the judgment that level 3-type restrictions in this country seem to be able to hold the virus, broadly speaking, at a given level of transmission, in other words, hold what you have as oppose to reducing. Our analysis, I think, correctly, is we have to absolutely drive down the rate of transmission, and that is why the level 5 measures were recommended by NPHET. The public in many respects may have gotten ahead of us in many parts of the country and begun that because we are seeing a suppression of the disease even if we still have some way to go.