Mr. Paul Reid:

It is the full-year annual cost. Obviously, we only started this process of building capacity in March and April. The cost for this year will be in the region of €450 million.

On the tracing of the virus, there has been a bit of confusion. I do not think anybody set out to cause it. Regarding WHO and ECDC guidelines, the priority is most definitely speed in making contact with close contacts. It has been proven across all testing and tracing systems that that is a priority. However, I wish to reassure the committee that our public health teams have done a phenomenal job relentlessly throughout the whole year.

Our public health teams look back further, and have knowledge beyond the contacts of cases and from the individual conversations they have with people. They have knowledge across their databases of a range of experiences of a number of people, and so have much more retrospective knowledge. They build that knowledge into their decision-making and information that they have. They look back beyond the 48-hour contact window for our contact tracing teams as they have data that go much further back than that.

However, that said, I wish to make two extra points. In response to the Deputy's last question, we are willing to and intend to look at and assess what further way one could go back and engage in what is called enhanced retrospective tracing. We are looking at that with NPHET to assess the issue. As regards the resourcing of the public health teams, part of what we know we must do is to resource up our teams. We have approval for 158 extra resources to go into these public health teams and they will not be for contact tracing. This will increase the capacity and capability of the teams in some of the areas about which the Deputy spoke. That plan has been approved and is currently being worked through with the teams regarding the mix of the multidisciplinary teams.