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

I thank the Deputy. I will do my best to answer as many questions as I can and, where I do not know the answer, I will ask the Minister for Health to correspond with the Deputy directly.

We are approaching 4,700 deaths in this State of people who died with Covid. We have reached the point where as many people have died from Covid-19 this year as did in all of last year. That is an extraordinary statistic, when one thinks about it. These are not just statistics but people with grieving families. That statistic demonstrates how serious the B.1.1.7. variant is and how different it is to the Wuhan strain or the wild strain that we dealt with last year. It perhaps demonstrates that getting down to low figures like ten, 50 or even 100 per day is not a prospect in the way it was last year because the virus has mutated and is more transmissible and deadly than the original wild strain. Despite the enormous efforts of the Irish people, who are doing all the right things, we have got stuck around 500 or 600 cases per day and it is hard to see how we will get much lower than that.

What are the things we are doing to attempt to reduce the numbers? We have increased border biosecurity. It is now the strictest in the European Union, with mandatory hotel quarantine starting tomorrow for people coming from more than 30 countries and anyone coming without a negative test from any country, including non-essential and essential travel. We will add many countries to that list in the coming weeks, once we have the system up and running. We have started walk-in PCR testing for people who have no symptoms in areas of high incidence, five of them to start-----

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