Dr. Tony Holohan:

As I said, we have some systems in place concerned with trying to make improvements. I say that because we are still in the middle of something that is still ongoing. While we are not predicting that we are going to see the kinds of impacts we saw previously, we must still be prepared for something else to happen and to happen quickly. As the Deputy knows, the first reports of the Omicron variant began to emerge in the last days of November, and we were then in a very different situation as a country by Christmas. That is an example of how quickly things can happen. We must be ready and we must ensure that we will be able to respond as quickly as that if something were to happen in future.

Compared with other countries, one of the things that has worked well here is that trusted public health advice, and I am not just talking about advice from me but from right across the board, and including colleagues in the HSE, has been to the fore in the response. The public health voice, particularly in the context of the health service and the leadership of the health service, and how the public health message is articulated is the key measure on which we have some further progress to make. There are plans to strengthen that aspect as much as we can.

Every public health system in the western world has been challenged by the scale of this pandemic and, as the Deputy rightly said, its mortality impact. It has been on a scale that we have not seen in many decades. We must now go through a process where we try to figure out how we can do better in anticipating, preventing and responding in this type of context. We will be doing that work assiduously in the coming weeks. We cannot wait until this pandemic is over to do it. We cannot wait until we get to a point when concerns about the potential emergence of new variants have abated. We must try to apply these kinds of measures and try to continually improve our response in this regard.

We have seen a large-scale operational response from the HSE to do some impressive things. We are all aware of the instigation and ramping up of the vaccination and booster programme, the testing and tracing capacity, etc. As we move forward, we must now also ensure that we build all those aspects into a regionalised public health response capacity which is intelligence-led and that will ensure we will have good quality public health data available to public health teams on the ground to enable them to respond as quickly as they possibly can. In general terms, it is a correct principle to say that the earlier it is possible to intervene in the case of the emergence of a new outbreak, the better will be the chance to mitigate the impact of any such infection. I refer to the capacity to spot something unusual happening at a local level and to put in place good measures to try to mitigate the phenomenon developing and to prevent it becoming established as a wider-spread infection.

In addition, given what we know now about Covid-19, I refer especially to the measures to be put in place to protect people who are vulnerable and most impacted by this disease. Unfortunately, we have seen that impact in the case of older people and those with significant underlying morbidities. We must put measures in place as fast as we can to try to protect them in future. Considering the speed at which this variant has shown it is possible for the disease to move, if there were to be new variants of concern, then there is every reason to believe they could move as quickly as this variant. We must be able to respond rapidly and appropriately to any such an occurrence. As a result, we would not claim in any way that we have no room for improvement. Every country in the western world can clearly see there is significant room for improvement in how we can all respond in this regard. That is what we will be trying to do from here on in.