Dr. Tony Holohan:

Our response is that every form of our handling of the pandemic has to evolve in relation to the threat. This includes economic and social restrictions, our testing regime, our public health response and the way we as officials perform in whatever role we might play. That includes every single one of us, whether it is front-line healthcare professionals, people involved in the role that NPHET carries out or people at a political level making decisions based on the advice. Each one of us will be changing our response because of the fortunate position in which we find ourselves, with high levels of vaccination and, hopefully, increasing confidence about the level of control we are achieving with regard to the disease. We need to find a way of moving on and incorporating our response to what will become an endemic disease into our public health management of the entire set of risks that might pertain to the population over the course of the winter. That is a perfectly natural evolution in response to any emergency.