Dr. Tony Holohan:

Our hopes and expectations are that we will not find ourselves in that position. We are going to express cautious optimism that that will remain the situation. The scenarios that might arise and could give rise to those requirements will be potentially related to new variants and the emergence of challenges that, at the moment, we do not see any signs of in the international sphere. What we have seen over the course of the past couple of months is the emergence of this highly transmissible Delta variant, which appears to have suppressed the spread of many of the other variants that had so-called vaccine escape potential, in other words, variants that vaccines were not as effective against.

Even though there was some impact with the Delta variant in terms of effectiveness of vaccines, it was not as great as perhaps with some of the other variants which were identified as variants of concern. We have seen a suppression of those, because Delta has essentially taken over transmission in the world. On the basis of our experience of Delta, and how we think things are going in this country, we think things at this point in time are going better than they are going in perhaps the four regions of the neighbouring country of the UK and it gives us a basis for expressing some cautious optimism that we will not need to go back the road in terms of some of these kinds of restrictions. The two things that are going to influence that are the very high levels of vaccination that we have achieved, and maintaining that and, second, the extent to which the public keeps up compliance with the basic and simple - you could say bog standard - guidance that we have given in regard to social distancing, mask wearing, avoiding indoors and the importance of being aware of the circumstances in which transmission is likely to arise, and that is where the ventilation question comes in. There was an extensive component in our last letter of advice dealing specifically with the question of ventilation - in the letter to the Minister-----