The impact of lockdowns

I just wanted to get your views on, you know, we're into obviously a second lockdown at the moment and you never know there may be subsequent lockdowns. What sort of effect is that? Could that have effect on people who are experiencing long Covid symptoms? Well the first thing to say is that actually we know that this is a highly highly infectious virus and it's spread within communities within a small environment and therefore having to lock down seems like a necessity to try and stop the spread to bring the R rate down. As far as lockdown and long Covid are concerned, again it's early days at the moment but the provisional evidence is actually people living on their own, people with mental health problems are being affected by it and this is a real genuine phenomena and like most things we need to get the balance right between lockdown and mental health problems as well. So it's really being cognizant that actually mental health is an issue and what is the plan for the future for this generation of both adults and children who are increasingly presenting to ED departments with mental health problems. So we need to have the infrastructure to plan for the future because there are going to be some ramifications of this if we don't have proper plans for this.