Dr. Tony Holohan:

As already stated, a significant component of the testing we are seeing at the moment is driven by the very sharp increase in testing of schoolchildren, which we have seen at previous stages in the pandemic. In response to the question, today is not the day but we think we are not far away from the point at which those criteria have been met, whereby we are thinking of changing the regime of testing along the lines I have previously described - in the interests of time, I will not describe it again - and also changing the purpose of it. We are in the happy situation that we have such high levels of vaccination, and of all of the other criteria being satisfied that enable us to have the confidence to say that we change our public health management. That is not the same - it is important to point this out - as promising that this disease, which will be with us, will not continue to cause a challenge for individuals who pick it up and will end up having severe infection and being admitted to hospital and ICU. We will see some mortality. That will be a continuing feature of our management of the disease, as well as outbreaks in some settings, particularly where those settings involved the gathering of large numbers of unvaccinated people. Vaccination still is the message, in spite of the very high levels we have already achieved.