Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Durkan has encapsulated the entire challenge in healthcare right now. It includes resumption of services and expansion of services according to Sláintecare and universal healthcare, areas such as mental health, disability, CAMHS, Covid, etc., that need particular attention and are getting great leadership from the Ministers of State, Deputies Butler, Feighan and Rabbitte.

I refer to the effectiveness of the basics. I am not a public health doctor but what they are telling me is that the single most important aspect of this is the basics. There are no amount of measures that any Government can bring in, and no amount of technology that can be deployed, that will ever work in the absence of people following the basics. The Deputy is asking almost the other side of that question which is whether they are enough in and of themselves. The CMO would be better placed to answer that question so I will give Deputy Durkan my observations. I would say that the short answer right now is probably "No". The reason I say that is that at level 2 a lot of people were following the basics and the virus grew. We then moved to level 3. It worked really well in Kildare, Laois and Offaly. We moved to level 3 in Dublin. It worked initially and then it flatlined and we got no further benefit out of it. We moved to level 3 in the Border counties and then to level 4 there. It worked very well and is working. On the matter of what we shall call enhanced level 3, where there were no household visits, the very significant good news we are seeing now is largely down to enhanced level 3 and indeed level 4 in the Border counties. The public health doctors say it takes a week to two weeks for measures to come through. Consequently the current thinking is that levels 4 and 5 are needed to push the virus back down to very low levels. That is the effort we are in at the moment and it would appear that level 3 holds the virus. It held it at a higher level in Dublin but ultimately, it did not bring it down quickly which is why we still saw exponential growth even though the country was at level 3.