Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

It is important that we are discussing this and I thank the Regional Group for bringing the motion forward. This is a huge issue. It is not discussed enough and it will become an even bigger issue. As the motion notes, there are likely to be well over 300,000 adults in the State who are suffering or have suffered from medical conditions associated with long Covid, based on an extrapolation of research done in the Netherlands.

I have seen at first hand people I know who have been affected by long Covid and continue to be, and the debilitating effects of it are immense. There is obviously a spectrum here in terms of how people are affected but at the high end of the spectrum, it is completely debilitating for people.

A report compiled by APC Microbiome Ireland, which is based in UCC, surveyed 1,000 people with long Covid. It found that nearly 70% of them were severely limited in their ability to work while 60% had missed work days due to their long Covid symptoms. Sixteen per cent of participants said they were unable to work at the time of the survey. Some were sick for up to 20 months while the median period of illness was over a year.

Within this general topic of long Covid, the question of long Covid for children is not discussed enough. I am sure many Deputies have received a message from Ms Hayley O'Connell, who is 11, turning 12 this January, and has long Covid and ME. Ms O'Connell states that she has had long Covid for about a year and a half and it is not easy. Hayley adds that you miss out on a lot of activities like going out with friends or going to the playground because you purely do not have the energy, and that it is not just about being tired - it is so much more. She adds that it also involves leg cramps, muscle pain, being weak and headaches, and that there is so much more. This was avoidable. We must ensure that all children and everybody are protected from this in the future.

In a way, there are two aspects to this. The first is to do the research on long Covid and provide the funding and the resources in terms of treatment of long Covid now. The HSE needs to establish a multidisciplinary public health team to review and manage long Covid. It is vital that this team includes patient advocates so that the voice of patients experiencing it is incorporated. It is a real problem that we still do not have long Covid services for children. The rundown that is happening in terms of the Mater is scandalous, to be blunt. It is probably a year or more since I was involved in a campaign, which was thankfully successful, to defend the long Covid clinic in Tallaght. We still do not have enough of them and the Government is not taking it seriously and is not providing the resources.

The other side of this question is that the best cure is prevention. We are still not doing enough to stop people getting Covid. Every time someone gets Covid, there is a risk - it is a small risk but it is present and one aggregates it over everybody - that 10% of people end up with long Covid. Therefore, we need to do now what we should have done two years ago, which is to focus on the central question of ventilation and filtration. It is almost a year since we introduced and had passed on Second Stage the Workplace Ventilation (Covid-19) Bill 2021 to give workers the right to clean air at work, which would include, obviously, schools and all indoor public spaces. We now, finally, from Thursday last, have the HSE opening up a consultation process on its code of practice for indoor air quality. I welcome this but it comes too late for the hundreds of thousands of people who are already suffering or have suffered from long Covid and the tens of thousands who will contract Covid and long Covid in the coming winter months. We need action in terms of ventilation and in terms of filtration such as high-efficiency particulate absorbing, HEPA, filters, now.

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