NPHET’s Dr Cillian De Gascun says international travel is ‘greater risk’ to Covid fight than indoor dining
LEADING virologist Dr Cillian De Gascun has said that travel is a "greater risk" to Ireland's fight against coronavirus than indoor dining.
The director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory and a member of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) said "travel comes with more unknowns".
He said: "For me travel comes with more unknowns, we can control indoor hospitality.
"I think the thing here is we want to try to open up as much of society as we can."
De Gascun said the country needs to keep the number of imported cases as low as possible.
'GREATER RISK'
Speaking on RTE Radio One's Today with Claire Byrne show, he added: “Travel is a greater risk to us.
"We don’t want to import more cases of the infections than is absolutely necessary but, from the point of view of returning to some semblance of normality, travel would be a component of that."
NPHET’s position has remained that non-essential travel should be avoided, he said, even though the Government had made a decision to go ahead with the European digital travel cert and to allow travel from July 19.
De Gascun added: "Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do."
DIGITAL CERTS
Last week, Tanaiste Leo Varadkar said young people who are not fully vaccinated can travel abroad from July.
But Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan has urged young people not to travel anywhere whilst unvaccinated.
Most read in News
Meanwhile, the president of the Irish Travel Agents Association Paul Hackett recently said "it's time for the Government to take control" of foreign travel advice for unvaccinated people.
Yesterday, Ryanair CEO Eddie Wilson said the government are ‘doing untold damage’ to economy by being ‘paddy last’ with EU digital Covid certs.
The certs came into effect yesterday.