Dr. Cillian De Gascun:

I want to highlight one thing. There have been a couple of suggestions we could have moved in this space earlier. I want to acknowledge the work of the aviation centre. I know they have been having meetings since this time last year in this space, because I was involved in a couple of those meetings. However, as the pandemic evolved, we had to prioritise. The first priority was to build up our testing capacity on-island for symptomatic individuals. Then our priority was residential care facilities and nursing homes. We had the meat processing plant and hospital outbreaks.

Our testing strategy has had to evolve and prioritise the most important areas of need. It is not that aviation was not important but given the restrictions on travel not only from Ireland but also from many other countries into Ireland because of our epidemiological situation at a point in time, it was difficult to do the pilots in those sectors. As Dr. Keogan has alluded to, it takes an awful long time to put in place the right pilot project to answer the question Deputy Ó Murchú is trying to ask. It is not that the aviation sector has not been willing to do this, it has just been challenging, given the fact there has been restriction on travel and the priorities have shifted over time, through no fault of its own.

The future out of this, as Dr. Holohan has said, is through vaccination and in a general sense, immunity. We need the population to be protected and vaccination is the best way of getting towards that direction. Probably 10% - 15% of the population has been infected over the course of the pandemic, so they will have natural immunity. However, as this virus becomes endemic, the way we are all protected is through immunity of some shape or form. Obviously, we want to use vaccination for that, so people do not get the disease and do not end up in hospital or with long-term morbidity. Ultimately, vaccination is the way through this.

We want to normalise this virus over the coming six months. We want it to become a virus along the lines of influenza. They are obviously different viruses, but we want to move towards that approach in which a person will be tested because he or she is sick, going into hospital, part of an outbreak or in another different setting. We do not want to medicalise normal life. We want people to get back to travel. They will still have to follow the public health guidelines. They will still have to be careful because other countries will not be in the same situation.