Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will do my very best, a Cheann Comhairle. In regard to care homes - the nursing homes and long-term care residential facilities - it is important to acknowledge that they are homes. These are people's residences. It is where they live. It is not the same as an acute hospital, for example, but there are standards and it is a highly regulated sector. The regulator is the Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, which carries out regular inspections and produces regular reports on how care and standards can be improved in those nursing homes. Some are very new, and the new ones tend to be single room only. Obviously, if they are single room only, just as is the case in any residence, it is easier to isolate and manage infection. However, some are also very old and will often have people sharing rooms and in that scenario it is more difficult to control infection. There is an ongoing programme to upgrade the public nursing homes. The standards for the new private ones are very high.

In terms of EU guidance, there is EU guidance just released yesterday on the steps that a government might take to reverse, release or ease restrictions but the paper, while it gives guidance, acknowledges that it is ultimately down to each member state to make the decisions for itself and each member state is at a different point in the pandemic and each member state is different in many different ways. However, the three areas that I believe have to be looked at, and these are set out in the paper, are, first, the epidemiology data. Are the number of cases coming down? Are the number of hospitalisations stabilising? Are the number of ICU cases going down? Is the death rate stabilising or going down? That elates to the epidemiological data.

The second area that we are called to look at is health service capacity. If the measures were to be relaxed and if there was then a spike in infections, as we have seen in Asia and other places, do we have the capacity to deal with that - the ICU beds, ventilators and all the rest of it? The third area, which is crucial, is whether we have the testing and contact tracing capacity to spot the outbreak or the spike if that were to occur again. Those are the kind of things we need to have in place before we can set out a roadmap towards easing restrictions. Ideally, we would like to do that before the end of the month, or certainly before 5 May, to be able to set out a roadmap to ease the restrictions in very clear steps with clear criteria that people can understand but always understanding that it might have to change because the science changes. This is a virus that only got a name two months ago, as one Deputy mentioned, and has only been testable since three months ago, and we also must recognise that we may have to reverse measures over time.

One advantage I believe we have is that we are a few weeks behind other countries in terms of the epidemic and we can watch what is happening in Italy and Spain, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and so on, in the same way Australia and New Zealand, which are probably four weeks behind us, can watch what is happening here. We always need to be very careful about comparing countries because each country is at a different point in the cycle but Deputies will be aware that schools are now opening in Denmark and some shops are reopening in Italy and Austria. We will have two weeks of data from those countries before 5 May, which will help to inform us as to whether those actions have been wise.

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