Dr. Colm Henry:

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently announced, as I am sure the Senator is aware, that it is no longer a public health emergency of international concern and is now part of normal healthcare business and is factored into our figures. We have thankfully noticed a lull in figures here. There are emerging variants all the time but thanks to the natural resistance of the population either from the vaccine programme or from acquired infection, and it is safe to say that nearly everybody must have been exposed to it at this stage, we are in a very different place from where we were a few years ago and as such, we were freed from the social restrictions and all the difficulties and secondary health problems that emerged with those.

Regarding long Covid, during the pandemic, we devised a model of care and have since checked it with HIQA the following year. We asked HIQA to do a review of updated evidence regarding our model of care, which was a layered model of care on self-awareness, self-management, GP supports, six clinics for long Covid and six for post-Covid based on the areas where we saw the highest incidence of Covid.