Dr. John Lambert:

We have let our guard down in the sense that a few months ago we went from discussing lockdown and mass vaccination of the whole country to all of a sudden ending lockdown and going back to normal life. People just quit using masks. We went too quickly to that. It will be very difficult to get people to go back to using masks again. I continue to use a mask, but I seem to be one out of 100 in the airport and one out of ten on public transportation doing that. The message is that Covid is not going to go away. It may not kill a person anymore, which is good, but I have so many people out of work, and that has an impact on people's jobs and employers. It has an impact on healthcare workers. We have had to cut back on many of our services in the hospital because some of our staff continue to catch Covid despite the fact that they wear masks at work. They are catching it in the community. Covid is not going to go away. I do not want to catch Covid. I do not want to be off work and I do not want to infect my family. As a result, in certain situations I continue to use a mask. That is just common sense. We should be pushing that with the Irish public because we are going to see another wave and another one. We need to find some way besides vaccines to get on with life safely.