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Public health officials have dismissed as impractical and risky the “zero Covid” strategy increasingly advocated by opposition politicians.
In an unusually frank criticism, senior members of the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) accused proponents of the strategy of making “false promises” that an end to the lockdown can be achieved soon by eliminating the virus.
“It is a completely false promise to say that we can go to Level 0 or 1 in the space of weeks or months,” Professor Philip Nolan, chairman of Nphet’s epidemiological modeling advisory group, said in a briefing Thursday night. “That will not happen, and it would be an incredibly risky thing because we will inevitably be a leaky country and the reintroduction of the disease could easily be new variants.”
Zero-Covid, defined by academics as “the absence for an appropriate period of time from community broadcasts,” has the partial or full support of most opposition parties and some government TDs. Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar have questioned its viability.
Professor Nolan said he shared the goal of reducing community transmission of the virus to “as close as possible” to zero, stopping non-essential travel, and doing “all we can” through testing and isolation to limit the risk of reintroducing the infection. .
“But we have to accept in the circumstances of this country that no such system will be perfect and can guarantee the complete exclusion of any new disease or variant.”
According to medical director Dr. Tony Holohan, zero Covid would be very difficult to apply “in a realistic way in an environment like ours.”
Ireland is a small economy that relies on its ties to Europe and “we just couldn’t realistically seal the borders of this country and prevent people from going in and out.” He said it was “much more reasonable to follow the current policy of reducing community transmission and vaccinating people as quickly as possible.”
Progress
Nphet, which on Thursday reported 47 deaths and 1,466 Covid-19-related cases, said great progress has been made last week in controlling the spread of the virus. However, the incidence is still twice as high as during the October peak, and the average number of deaths is higher than during the first wave last spring.
The Health Service Executive will resume close contact testing on Friday, a month after he was forced to stop due to the post-Christmas spike in cases. You are also restarting phone calls to contacts after a period during which they were informed of your status by text message.
Trip
Meanwhile, the government is working to draft regulations and laws for new restrictions on international travel. Officials in various government departments are grappling with complex legal issues, including how to enforce quarantine and impose fines on people taking nonessential travel to the Republic from the north.
According to plans, there will be a mandatory quarantine at a designated facility for incoming travelers who are unable to provide a negative Covid-19 test prior to departure, as well as for all those traveling from Brazil and South Africa. The law will require other travelers to self-quarantine at home.
It is understood that a month-end deadline has been set for the introduction of various measures, including increasing fines from € 100 to € 500 for trapped individuals returning from non-essential travel abroad and developing a list of reduced exemptions for individuals. who are allowed to travel internationally,
A government source said officials were “working on all the proposals urgently.”
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