Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

No problem. I apologise as I was in a meeting of the Oireachtas transport committee. Many meetings run parallel here. I read Dr. Lambert’s opening statement and I have been following some of the debate from my office upstairs.

I have a few questions. Some of Dr. Lambert’s counterparts, for example, The Ohio State University, used baseline information that they had on elite athletes. Unlike most of the population, they are, probably on a weekly basis, checked for lung and heart capacity and regularly give blood samples. They are very healthy people in general with a load of baseline information that can be looked at. In particular – this was picked up in some of the Irish papers last year – they looked at 26 university level athletes, all elite, who had Covid, but four of them came out of Covid with myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, scarring of the lungs and damage that will probably or possibly remain with them for a long time. In Ireland, in the past decade or two, we have also built up a kind of a capacity of screening our elite athletes. Has any analysis been done of them in terms of knowing where their baseline health was at and where they are at coming out of Covid perhaps?