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

I thank the Deputy for her questions. To clarify, and I have clarified it before, when I used the term "disproportionate", what I was referring to was the fact that it could be argued, and I think it will be argued, that it is disproportionate to impose mandatory hotel quarantine on people who do not have Covid when we do not do that to people who do have Covid. At the moment, there are lots of people in the country who have tested positive for Covid and, fortunately, none of them is in mandatory hotel quarantine. That is where we may very well run into a very genuine legal issue around proportionality, because the vast majority of people travelling in from overseas do not have Covid and they have a test to say they do not, whereas we know there are hundreds of people every day in Ireland testing positive for Covid and we do not mandatorily quarantine them. Obviously, anything that could save hundreds of lives or thousands of lives is proportionate in my view. The disproportionality point is a different point and perhaps is one that we will hear about in the courts at some point in the future.

In regard to cases, it is important to say that we have gone from a situation where we were seeing 6,000 or 7,000 cases a day to 1,000 or fewer a day now. That is a very significant reduction in the caseload. The number in hospital is below 1,000 and the number of people in ICU is about 170. While we have seen a very significant decrease from the peak of the third wave, these figures are still higher than the peak of the first wave and we have a long way to go yet before we are in a position to ease restrictions substantially. We need to get down to much lower numbers than we have now.

We have not agreed an exact number. I know why the Deputy would like that. It is something that I would have liked in the past. However, the advice we have from NPHET is very strong on this, namely, that it is very wrong to pick particular exact numbers and that we need to look at a number of things in the round. It is not just the five-day or seven-day case number average, the positivity rate, the number of people in ICU, the number of people in hospital or the number of hospital beds available. We have to look at all of these things and using one or two metrics, NPHET advises, is too crude. The Government has accepted that advice.

In terms of strategies, I do not think it is a choice between one or two strategies. There are a lot of slogans floating around and there are many different strategies and sub-strategies. It is the detail that is important. There really is not any strategy, unfortunately, that avoids the risk of rolling lockdowns or snap lockdowns. We saw in Perth the other day that one or two cases of community transmission led to a five-day snap lockdown there. In our context, with our geography, with the Border, with people coming in in the front of trucks and the back of trucks, if we applied the same policy here, we would probably have snap lockdowns every week, every two weeks or every three weeks. We have to bear in mind that our geography does affect us.

In terms of living with Covid, what that means is suppression. It means reducing numbers as low as we can so that we can open society and the economy in a way that is sustainable. Yes, there is modelling done on this but, no, we have not picked any exact numbers. NPHET advised that for reasons I explained.

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