Ms Orla Hegarty:

I do not know that it is possible to answer that because there are a lot of unknowns with this disease and there are a lot of unknowns over the next few months, especially with variants. We need to be very cautious opening, in risk assessment terms, with a small percentage of the population vaccinated.

Masks are by far the best protection we have. The highest risk is close to somebody who is infected. Another strange characteristic of this disease is that most of the people who get infected are infected by somebody who does not know that they are ill. You are infected by somebody who is either pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic. He or she is not showing symptoms. That is why it has been so difficult to tackle this disease around the world. Other illnesses may have something that demonstrates symptoms and people stay at home, but not with this one.

Masks are by far our best defence because they do two things. They stop somebody who may be infected putting virus into the air and they protect the other person who is breathing. They are also cheap, low-tech, manageable and visible. Unlike some other places where they are removing mask restrictions, we should be very careful about rowing back on that because people have been very compliant here with wearing masks. Wearing masks might be more of an issue in specialist settings. Clearly, people in Asia wearing masks on public transport as a matter of course has been very effective.

Somebody asked about entertainment and hospitality. A trial was run at a concert in Germany last summer where people were put in very good quality masks and very good ventilation was put in the building. They found they were both effective mitigation measures for a large crowd gathering for a concert. Some of this may come down to what mitigation measures people are willing to accept to have more social contact. There is a balance here rather than going back to the way things were. It is about adapting to things that will work so that we can have social and economic activity, in the main, by targeting specific areas and accepting mitigation measures that are effective but yet allow us to do most of what we want to do.