Nphet expert: We are looking at an outdoor summer

Professor Philip Nolan: “The reality is that outdoors is safer than indoors, the reality is that some level of mixing of households is required for us all to stay sane into the summer.” Picture: Brian Lawless/PA

“We’re looking at an outdoor summer," the chair of Nphet’s epidemiological modelling advisory group, has warned.

Philip Nolan also said that although the progress in driving Covid numbers down has stalled, our “extremely efficacious” vaccines offer significant hope for the future and he predicted reaching below 100 cases per day "sometime" in April.