Dr. Tony Holohan:

In a word, "yes". We think we are not far away from a point whereby all of the criteria we set out in the advice we provided to the Government, which is accepted as the basis upon which we might consider moving to another phase in terms of our management of the pandemic, are met. That was the basis, ultimately, on which we advised Government and the Government then identified a series of dates for easing of certain restrictions. For example, next Monday some of the measures relating to the workplace will kick in and a final date of 22 October has been identified. We think we are not far away from the point of achieving those criteria which, on the one hand will look at our vaccination uptake rate. We have a target of 90% for the over 16s which we are very close to at this point, which is almost unprecedented in comparison to many other countries. We also look at the features of the disease and its behaviour, having the disease doing what we want it to do and we see a lot of encouraging trends at the moment in terms of the downward incidence in some of the age groups. We want to see that continue and will monitor the impact of the return to school and some of the other measures that were eased in the early part of September before we will be in a position to advise in relation to the criteria moving on. However, we are optimistic that we are close to that point.

At that point, we will change utterly the environment in which we consider testing. Heretofore we were testing every single case and were advising every single individual who had symptoms to contact a GP to arrange a test. We provided walk-in testing facilities and online facilities for people to book tests and so on. We will have to evolve our management of the pandemic because of our success in achieving all of these indicators to one whereby we test to support clinical decision making, that is, to support doctors in clinical situations who need to determine whether a sick patient is sick because of influenza or because of Covid-19 because that could influence the management of that patient and also for monitoring purposes or what we call surveillance. That will be based on our primary care surveillance system, the surveillance of things like waste water and maybe some other forms of surveillance in the third level sector, as mentioned previously, and in those environments where we have particularly sick and vulnerable people.

It is a different form of testing and for a very different purpose. Our contact tracing arrangements and the wider parts of our public health management are evolving to reflect a situation where we now have a population which we have to regard as being as protected as it can be through vaccination and the huge effort that has been made to get as many people vaccinated as possible. It is still our hope and expectation that the small remaining numbers of people who remain to be vaccinated will come forward for vaccination. Looking at the entire population, even though we have done as well we have, between 1 million and 1.5 million people are not vaccinated, either because they are children or people who have not come forward for vaccination. There is still time. There is still capacity to deliver vaccines on the part of the HSE. If there are individuals out there or people who have influence over individuals who are not yet vaccinated, getting vaccinated is still the most important thing that an individual can do.