Dr. Tony Holohan:

We are coming to some of those questions. We have a NPHET meeting scheduled for tomorrow. My hope and expectation is that within a very short period, which I do not want to put a date on specifically but within a short period, we believe we will have had enough time to monitor the impact of the resumption of the school year on potential transmission.

As the Deputy rightly said, we have seen a significant increase in testing. That level of increase in testing has outstripped the increase in incidence so in other words, the positivity has dropped. What we have seen is that increase in incidence, particularly in the five to 12-year-olds, is explained by the huge volume of additional testing that has now been done in that age group. It is not a true underlying change in the incidence of the disease in those age groups, which is a very important observation. We want to maintain that observation for a sufficient time, which we think is not much longer, to allow us to say that we are in a position to change to a different form of management of the disease, not just in respect of schoolchildren but in respect of testing and contact tracing for the whole of society. We do not believe it is necessary-----