Hazari also for Christmas. I love Rob Iure first time cooking the dinner, but at least it's for a smaller crowd. I'm the same. Jane mentioned getting her crown, but I don't know if that's a hint for a present or something to do with the turkey.

Sounds like you need more help than I can give you, should you say, for chatbot. But it has lots of recipes and cooking advice. It's on Facebook, Alexa and Google assistant. You're a lifesaver now.

I better get my prince and princess home. See you soon. See if a chocolate is the real life saver. Happy Christmas.

The Pot Candy Show on news talk with Marter private network during current restrictions. Don't ignore your health concerns. Our expert team is ready to help. Interesting story I've just come across, it's the world's first affordable saliva test for covid-19 provides accurate results in under 15 minutes. Now, this is what the company says about it. It's called the No. Now, a covid-19 test. And it seems to use the same way that the virus uses to get into your body.

It uses the same kind of receptive technology. So if the virus is there, it tries to get into this test. And the idea is that the test is visible to the naked eye. You don't need any special equipment or whatever. And it's a cheek swab, just a swab inside your cheek.

We will get that look on you maybe on Thursday to have a look at that test and see whether it has a future, if it's there, if it's cheap and all you have to do is cheek swab.

It could be a game changer in getting people out of the workplace, out of schools, out of colleges, if they are positive anyway, we shall see. But that new strain of the coronavirus and the travel ban already in place are causing some dismay. Is there a possible change of tactic on the cards for us and what should that be? Well, we're joined by Professor of Health Systems at the School of Nursing in disp Anthony St. Anthony.

Good morning. Good morning, Miles.

Now, let's put that swab test to one side at the moment, the instant test, because we don't know whether or not it will do the business.

So failing all of that, what should we be doing?

I think the first thing to say is not to panic. The evidence in this virus is this new strain of the virus is limited at the moment. It is the nature of this virus. You've got different strains that that's normal. That happens. People have been tracking those for months.

I think we need to do to have a serious plan and a plan for for Ireland and ideally coordinated north and south. But we can do it in the south if we wish. And the plan is to get our lives back to normal by Patrick's Day. And it involves intensive public health measures. It involves a using a lot because we are going into lockdown in January. There's no scenes, no doubt about that. Now, the question is, what do we get out of it?

Do we at the end of it, we go back to normal and then bounce back into another lockdown? Or do we get down to very low levels of virus and bring it under control? There's a whole bunch of my colleagues and myself published an article in The Lancet on Saturday laying out how to do this across Europe. And we're asking all the European governments to step up to the plate on this arrow. We think the governments are looking for someone to show leadership.

And we think Neil Martin, who has a strong track record in public health, would be a good choice to do this. We're hoping that he will. OK. And what is the plan?

I mean, let's talk about sector by sector.

For example, if you're in a level five lockdown of the schools closed, what we would suggest in Ireland is to maybe open the schools in February, so run the school year a month later, do the leaving in June and June, beginning of July. But it is about not just about lockdown. So we keep saying this. No one is listening. Lockdowns are not a method for controlling our infections. There are method of buying time for public health to control viral infections.

So we need to put resources into frontline public health, into the regional public health departments. And we're probably talking about, you know, 40 million, 50 million, something like that. Now to spend now where we're spending money, we're spending more on that every week on this virus.

We bring the public health measures you're talking about. Contact tracing, fast contact tracing, fast testing in South Korea. If I have a test, I can get the results in six hours to my mobile phone. There's no delays, no messing around. I know what the test result is very, very quickly. There's no barriers to getting tested. There's no barriers to contact tracing. We said if you are infected, we sit down and go over your contacts for the last 10 days with you to try and work out where you were infected to try and track what's going on.

We don't know where most people are getting infected. And it's really hard to control a virus if you don't know where most cases are coming from and we still don't isolation. So some people can isolate in their own homes. They're fortunate enough to be able to do that. Not everyone can. People need to have their salaries maintained when they're isolating, particularly people on lower incomes. It is absolutely imperative that people are not losers by isolation because they're isolated to protect everybody else.

That's why they're doing it.

And it's a reason why workers, of course, who suffer because, you know, they might be on a few hours a week here, a few hours a week there.

And there's no, if you like, a named employer through whom funds can be channeled.

Yeah. And with that, that needs to be fixed. I mean, you know, we we could use our community welfare officers who are really good and who know their communities inside out to do that. There's lots of different ways to do it, but we have to do it now. We are doing better than than England, that England is doing really, really badly and Europe in general is not doing well. We're doing better than most countries in Europe.

I've read the worst crisis in the last few days, Anthony, about how all of Western Europe is following the same model and we shouldn't be copying each other and seeing what we do well or not. I mean, the Swedish experience, people wanting to copy that and then turns out that was the wrong way to go, that we should be looking to Asia where they actually have controlled things very well.

And you know, the suggestion here that if I share my data, that's some sort of a crime against humanity.

The crime against humanity is someone dying from a virus that they don't need to die from.

We seem to have lost Anthony again, I've read you a couple of texts I have I have a relative living in London who's been diagnosed with covid-19 for a second time. His doctor told him that the assumption is you can be reinfected by this new strain regardless of previously having covered. I'm not sure about that. There have been cases reported, as Luke O'Neil has reported to us, of people being infected a second time, very, very few.

And the infection tends to be milder than the first infection. Now, Texture tells me I went into a pub at the weekend to use the loo. I saw three tables of the usual suspects, no sign of any food, and the staff were not wearing any masks. I think we're rejoined by Anthony now, this time on the landline. We're giving up on high tech and going back to old tech. Anthony, are you there?

Yeah. OK, so it needs some sort of leadership from the top to suggest we have a plan and it's a unique plan to Ireland, our aim is by Paddy's Day. We can go mad again.

Yes. And there's a price. The price is quarantined for people coming in at the airports, at the airports, hotels, as they're doing in Australia. So what it says to the tourism industry is this next summer, you bring in Irish visitors. Locals coming stay locally. The foreign visitors won't be there, but at least there will be a tourist industry if we have two summers on the truss with with the tourist industry and the hospitality industry devastated, how much of it will still be here?

Neal Martin has said that mass vaccination will start in August. Now, that really does imply that we won't be back to anything like normal until probably November. I'd be very upset.

And I wonder I mean, hang on a second, Anthony. This business of mass vaccination, that is the cohort between, say, 16 and 55 or whatever it is that they won't get the vaccine until then. Is this a case of politicians under promising so they can over deliver because all the smart money is saying it'll happen much faster than that?

I mean, with the plethora of vaccines that will be available through our relationship with the EU and common purchasing and so on. Why should it take that long?

The public health money is saying Millmerran is right. Biotech announced two days ago they were buying a new factory. From, I think, Novartis to make the vaccine. If you cannot set up a factory to make the vaccine in a week, this is a very precise product that has to be made to the very highest standards or is a disaster. I'm confident it will be made to the highest standards, but that's going to take time. And the Johnson Johnson vaccine on the way, there's a number of Chinese vaccines, there's a Sputnik V available, AstraZeneca is going to be delivering in spades.

So, again, is it maybe learning from their mistakes in the past and not overpromising on this and promising so then they can get a slap on the back when they deliver early?

Possibly. But the people I've spoken to in public health are all saying the same thing. They're all saying middle of the summer, end of the summer for mass vaccination. I don't know.

I'm not a vaccine expert, but the people I think we should already begin to see the impact of vaccinations even by Patty's Day, because at that point, we should have everyone in nursing homes. We should have all frontline staff. We should have the very elderly already vaccinated. And some people who have underlying conditions who are younger than that vaccinated, we still we should be beginning to see impacts.

We should we should be seeing fewer deaths. We should be seeing fewer cases, which is fantastic. But one of the reasons we want to vaccinate everybody is that there's the group of people at highest risk are also the group and the vaccine is most likely to fail. And that's a problem with all the vaccines. And it's why we want to vaccinate enough people to stop the virus circulating. We vaccinate children against measles primarily to protect babies under the age of one who were too young to be vaccinated but get devastating illness if they get measles.

We're vaccinating all the older children to protect the youngest children, because if we don't, we pay a very heavy price. And the analysis here is the same. We're trying to vaccinate everybody to stop the virus spreading around our communities because as a cohort of people who are at quite high risk of bad outcomes from covid, who are also quite high risk of not responding to the vaccine, and that's not a defect in the vaccine. It's just the nature of the human immune system.

We can't fix that. Someone wants to know one of our listeners, what do you mean by the vaccine may fail vulnerable people?

I mean that you may give someone the vaccine and they fail to manage to protect an effective protective immune response and they can get clinically ill with covid later on that stuff.

These are people I mean, older people have a less robust, less robust antibody response.

I mean, there's a lot of people on like heart transplants like me on immunosuppressive drugs. So I'm personally involved in this minyon system is switched off or substantially switched off so that I can maintain a transplant. But that does put me at higher risk if I'm infected and at higher risk of not responding to the vaccine with the best will in the world. I'll tell you, I presume you will get the vaccine, but I'm not convinced that you will mount the appropriate response to it.

I hope I hope that will give you protection. Yeah.

Yeah, I hope so. I hope I will. There's no guarantees.

OK, so if I'm elderly and get the vaccine, I may not be immune, but instead get sick with covid. No, that's not what Anthony said, that you'd get covered from the vaccine. You cannot get covered from the vaccine.

Vaccine does not contain the virus. There is no part there's no way for the vaccine to give you an infection. It does not contain any virus.

Some more Newstalk listeners getting in touch. This man, Anthony Stain's, is talking sense. My better half and her colleagues are working in a Hajazi lab. The turnaround in lab testing results is very fast. Only a matter of a few hours.

But the delay is logistics in getting samples to labs and then the notifications process.

So once they have it in the lab, they turn it around quickly. But it's the other bits, the before and after slowing it down. I agree with Anthony. We can't keep opening and closing a hard lockdown for eight weeks.

Both sides of the border would bring it low enough for us to get back to some sort of normality, says Ed. That's Anthony's point, precisely. But of course, we have that old border issue and you've got you know, they equivocate up there. They can't agree on anything. Five parties, party sharing, and some of them with, shall we say, philosophical issues about border controls at the border.

I was talking to some people in Donegal this morning. We've been working closely with colleagues in Northern Ireland about what needs to happen. And it's all in part, it is entirely doable. It's easier if there's agreement north and south, no questions, but it can be done on either side. So. All right.

Well, your plan is shut down for a bit longer.

A firm shut down, keep the schools closed for a month, delay the leaving serves, junior senator, etc. If that is to go from public health, ramp up public health, quarantine people as they come in, put them in the hotels.

A bit of business for the hotels. Very welcome indeed. And then by the seventeenth of March, we should be at least internally good to go with our hospitality and all the rest of it.

It sounds attractive to me.

It is doable, but it needs political leadership. There's no way public health can lead this. This has to be led from the Phoenix office. And I think I think Neil Martin has done great public health stuff before. I hope this is something that will appeal to him and his colleagues.

All right. Well, we shall hear more of what the government is thinking in a few minutes time.

We'll be talking to the Minister for Logistics and the rest of it shortly. But professor of Health Systems at the School of Nursing at Desu Anthony Stain's, thank you very much for joining us.

Hey, Sarah, you also for Christmas? I love Rob Iure first time cooking the dinner, but at least it's for a smaller crowd.

I'm the same. Jane mentioned getting a crown, but I don't know if that's a hint for a present or something to do with the turkey.

Sounds like you need more help than I can give you, should you say, for chat. But it has lots of recipes and cooking advice. It's on Facebook, Alexa and Google assistant. You're a lifesaver.

Now I better get my prince and princess home.

A chocolate is the real life saver. Happy Christmas.