Governments should ask families to postpone Christmas gatherings, says Scally

The Stormont executive should close restaurants and bars, restrict shopping and tell people there will be “no five days free for everyone” during Christmas, said a public health expert.

Dr. Gabriel Scally said that Northern Ireland should not have lifted the Covid-19 restrictions last Friday. It was “crazy,” he said on RTÉ radio’s Today with Claire Byrne program.

Earlier on Twitter, Dr. Scally said the handling of the pandemic in the North “is incredible.”

He wrote: “The health service is on the verge of being overwhelmed, but efforts to prevent growth in cases have been relaxed. Shops, cafes, restaurants and bars serving food all open. Disaster is coming. “

He told the program that if the politicians cannot be solved, then “they are lost in the North.”

Dr Scally of the Royal Society of Medicine said the governments of Ireland and the UK should ask families to postpone Christmas family reunions until the summer solstice next June.

He said two additional holidays should be offered in June 2021 as an incentive for people to stay away from their family during the upcoming holiday season. By then, the launch of the vaccine would have helped tremendously.

He added that political divisions were standing in the way of fighting the virus and must be stopped. “There must be a unified preventive approach, rather than the current reactive,” he said.

Dr. Scally’s comments came after up to 17 ambulances were forced to queue outside a hospital in Co Antrim on Tuesday. Wendy Magowan, director of operations for the Northern Health Trust, said there was no line for ambulances in front of the Antrim Area Hospital on Wednesday morning, but there were 43 patients in the emergency department waiting to be admitted to the wards. She told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that the current situation was “completely different” from April and May, when the Northern Health Trust had much more bed capacity.

Another six coronavirus-related deaths and 486 confirmed cases were reported in Northern Ireland on Tuesday. The hospital network was operating at excess capacity, with 104 percent of the beds occupied, according to the Northern Health Department.

‘Nightmare’

The president of the British Medical Association (BMA) in Northern Ireland has warned that the health service in the North faces a nightmare in the coming weeks due to a “leadership failure” in the Executive.

Dr. Tom Black told RTÉ radio’s News at One that further restrictions would not make a difference at this stage. “The die is cast.”

Dr. Black said that the BMA was now “above the politicians” to speak directly to the public to encourage them to restrict their movements and reduce their social contacts.

There was real concern about the problems the health service will face in the coming weeks, he said, particularly in intensive care departments where there was a fear that doctors would be asked to make “moral and ethical decisions” by which They were not there. trained.

The Northern public had “given up” due to the “lack of clarity” in the decisions made by political leaders in Stormont, he said.

Virtually every hospital in the north was dealing with ambulances lining up outside with patients for whom there were no beds, he said.

When asked if the North’s health service would have to seek help from the Republic, he said it was “an inevitable consequence.”

He believed that there had been a leadership failure in the North. Looking south, people could see Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin working together and the public responding to calls about restrictions. “That’s where we should have been,” he said.

Anne O’Connor, HSE’s director of operations, said the health service in the Republic was “not in terrible trouble,” but warned that as there was an increase in cases in the community, in a matter of weeks, those cases were they would translate into “problems in our hospitals” and then critical care.

He added: “There is no doubt that our system will be under pressure in January.”

On Tuesday, the North Korean Health Minister said he would present new proposals to the Executive aimed at limiting the spread of the coronavirus during the Christmas period.

Robin Swann told the Assembly that he would present a document Thursday with a “series of recommendations.” He declined to elaborate.

Northern Ireland emerged from a two-week “circuit breaker” lockout on Friday. From December 22-28, people from the North will be allowed to travel anywhere in the UK and “bubble up” with up to three more households from December 23-27.