North’s Covid crisis could be repeated in the state if the situation allowed it to ‘get out of control’

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has warned that the Covid-19 crisis in the North could happen in the State “if we let things get out of control”.

The latest figures from the Northern Department of Health show that hospital bed occupancy in Northern Ireland is now 105 percent.

Expressing solidarity with Northern Ireland, where patients were being treated in ambulance lines outside hospitals due to the lack of beds and the increasing incidence of the virus, Mr Martin said the situation was “very, very worrying and worrying ”.

He said the issue will be discussed at the North-South Ministerial Council meeting on Friday and “we will work with our colleagues from the North Executive.”

He believed that Northern Health Minister Robin Swann had led well during the crisis when faced with a challenging situation.

“It is a multi-party executive and that creates its own challenges,” he said.

Mr. Martin added that “it also illustrates the exponential growth of the virus once it reaches a certain critical level and we in the Republic must take note of what is happening in the North in terms of how we behave collectively and individually.”

Warning that “every contact is important”, he said that “what we are witnessing in Northern Ireland could happen here if we allow things to get out of hand, which we are not going to do.

With mounting pressures on Northern Ireland’s health service due to Covid-19 and the general pressures of winter, the Northern health department also reported on Wednesday afternoon that 457 patients are currently receiving treatment for the coronavirus in the United States. hospitals.

Of these 32 patients are being treated in intensive care, 25 of them with ventilators.

The department also recorded eight more deaths from Covid-19, bringing the total to 1,143. There were 510 new cases of the virus, bringing the total to 59,631 cases.

On Tuesday, the pressure was so great at the Antrim Area Hospital that 17 ambulances queued outside the hospital with no space inside to treat patients. Instead, medical staff evaluated them in ambulances.

The Northern Trust, which runs the hospital, reported that on Wednesday morning there were no ambulances waiting outside the emergency department (ED) at the Antrim Area Hospital.

“The hospital remains under great pressure with a total of 49 people in the emergency department, 42 waiting to be admitted. Thirty-two of those people have been waiting more than 12 hours, ”said a spokeswoman for the trust.

“This is not a situation that anyone wants to see and we sincerely apologize to the affected patients and their families. The staff is working very hard to try to handle the situation and keep the flow going, ”he said.

A joint statement is expected later Wednesday from the British government and administrations in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales on whether, as planned, there will be a further relaxation of Covid regulations in the period from December 23 to December 27. .

Close Restaurants

However, a public health expert has said that the Stormont Executive should close restaurants and bars, restrict shopping and tell people there will be no “five days free for all” during Christmas.

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.

‘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.”

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.