John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

What Dr. Ní Bhriain has just outlined there is for me a much more sympathetic, compassionate description than in her opening statement. On that notion of a constellation of symptoms and in terms of defining long Covid, have the witnesses ever experienced a disease or an infection that subsequently caused a constellation of infections or disorders or that could be characterised as an entity before? Is this really a case of Covid being new in the context of our experience of this? What I am driving at is the witnesses who came before us in the first session are very convinced in their life experience that long Covid is a fact of their life and a very physical, medical experience with a list of symptoms. However, some of the case studies referred to have included GPs asking people whether they are suffering from any undue anxiety at the moment, which is kind of undermining. One of the things I am trying to do in asking the questions is reaffirm the notion of long Covid. I have this real fear that the longer we travel away from the Covid experience the less time we will give to this and the less efficacy we will attribute to it.