A five-day mandatory quarantine for passengers arriving into Ireland will allow too many new coronavirus cases into the country, according to Trinity Professor Aoife McLysaght.

The Cabinet sub-Committee on COVID-19 will today consider introducing the measure for all travellers arriving into the country without a negative test.

Government leaders will also discuss extending Level Five restrictions for another month, with a final decision to be made at Cabinet tomorrow.

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Trinity Professor of Genetics Aoife McLysaght said five days is “not enough.”

“What we know now about this virus is that the incubation period can be longer than that,” she said.

“In Australia, they tried a range of different quarantine regimes and testing and things like that and they settled on 14 days as being the most effective one.

“It isn’t even 100% effective. Some people take longer than 14 days for the virus to turn up in them, in terms of the test.

“It catches 98% and they decided that was a sufficient measure, considering all of the balances.”

She said a full quarantine regime must go hand in hand with proper test/trace/isolate infrastructure so we can get cases down and respond to outbreaks as they occur.

“What we do in the meanwhile in the country is we get the cases really low with the other means available to us,” she said.

“We allow the public health doctors to chase it out and we vaccinate our population – but we do it in comfort.”

‘Two-islands’

The Taoiseach Micheál Martin spoke to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson about the possibility of a ‘two islands’ approach to international travel over the weekend; however, it is unclear whether they will be able to reach an agreement.

Professor McLysaght said an agreed system on both sides of the border in Ireland would be “ideal.”

“Obviously the ideal is that we get some kind of cooperation because that would be a more complete solution,” she said.

“We all know there have been difficulties in getting agreement but I think people are recognising that this is a very deep problem and whatever the differences, we have a lot of common.

“We all have family and we all parents and older people we want to protect so I hope to commonalities can shine through.”

Border

She said the majority of cross-border travel at the moment is related to people who work on both sides rather than people travelling from one end of the island to another.

“Those kind of everyday-type interactions can be accommodated and you can have a bubble and you can recognise that this is part of people’s normal working life to do that – when we are in a situation where people are going to work,” she said.

“At the moment the advice is stay at home if you can anyway for everybody, North and South.

“These kind of everyday type interactions, which are just kind of hopping either side of the border in relatively short distances is very different to people going long distances.

“I think that can be recognised.”

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