Ms Orla Hegarty:

On cost, as a very first measure, for less than €1 million every school could have one CO2 meter that could be moved around. There are about 4,000 schools so it would be well within that cost. That would also raise awareness as a first step and identify dead areas and hot spots. If every classroom needed a monitor, which is probably where we need to move, it would be considerably more because there are probably tens of thousands of classrooms. There is a balance of identifying risk and areas that need to be watched. Even with a change of wind direction, conditions in a classroom can go from low to high risk pretty easily, so it needs active monitoring.

As for filtration, some classrooms are well designed for cross-ventilation and may be relatively low risk, but others may have smaller spaces for special needs education, childcare or early years education where people might not be wearing masks and filtration would be a better option. The exercise would need to be done on how that money was spent. Germany is spending a lot of money on this area, as are American schools.

We do not have as big a challenge as many other places because we have a mild climate and we naturally ventilate our buildings. In America most of the schools are mechanically ventilated. We have an easier problem to fix or maybe we have buildings that are more responsive to be able to deal with high-risk situations quickly. Measuring is part of it. I do not have an assessment of the cost for every school. Basic information could probably go a very long way.

Regarding supporting the work, I will speak personally because I cannot speak for the group. It would be very beneficial if there was a forum for multidisciplinary engagement. As things stand, the people dealing with behavioural science, the people dealing with the medical side, the people calculating the epidemiological projections and the people dealing with ventilation all work in isolation. There is no sharing of knowledge or information that would help people to refine what they are doing to use the resources more strategically.

The key point in all of this is that we do not need to prevent every case to stop a pandemic. We do not need to deal with every building. We just need to do enough to get the R-nought below 1. Very strategic activity in places where people gather in large numbers, on public transport and in particular high-risk settings such as meat plants, could have a very substantial impact overall. It is not a case of spending money on every building or changing everybody's home. It is about advising people how to live more safely so that they can make strategic decisions that are safer. It is the cumulative effort of that, along with targeted measures somewhere else. It is just a proactive approach, using what we have and using it wisely.