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THE PUBLIC HAS BEEN WARNED that if social contacts and activities are not reduced this week and over the weekend, Covid-19 transmission levels will be similar to those seen in Northern Ireland in recent days.
Schools will be closed for two weeks and pubs and restaurants for four weeks in Northern Ireland under new restrictions to curb the spread of Covid-19 transmission.
Dr Mary Favier, Covid-19 Advisor to the Irish Council of General Practitioners (ICGP) and a member of NPHET, told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that GPs have been under pressure in recent weeks due to increased demand of references for testing.
He said that while there has been some stabilization in Dublin under Tier 3 restrictions, “it is not enough.”
“We’ve seen him in our public health and tracking services really unable to keep up with the numbers, through no fault of his own, just the numbers. So we have to do something different. “
Dr. Favier said that the Republic is “in a more difficult challenging situation than the North” due to resource deficiencies in our health system.
“We lack about 600 family doctors, we lack many hospital beds and nurses, we lack specialists in public health, we have been for so many years,” he said.
“General practitioners and the general medical profession have been saying for several weeks that more needs to be done. This virus inevitably gets worse. It doubles in size every week to two weeks, and it has an inevitable impact on our health services. So we have to do something different.
“That is, either we change our behavior under the current restrictions or we change the restrictions, and now there is little time to decide.”
He said that when people changed their behavior to reduce transmission in March, April and May, they “got behind the wheel,” but now there is complacency.
“The difficulty is that the health services now run a marathon, not a sprint,” he said.
“There have to be decisions made by the government to change the way we manage this disease. Unless we see some radical differences in behavior over the next few days or weeks, I think we will be in a situation like the one in the North, our border counties say. “
He said people still have the opportunity today and over the weekend to make a difference by reducing the number of close contacts and doing more outdoor activities.
We need to ask employers to say that staff should work from home, if possible. It seems that many people still go out to work when the ideal would be to work from home, we ask people not to travel unless absolutely necessary, not to go to the gym, all those kinds of sports activities – don’t do it at all. Unless necessary, if you are meeting a friend, have a cup of coffee and walk instead of sitting in a place less than six feet away. It’s the little activities that will make the difference.
Also speaking to Morning Ireland today, Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald said:
“There is no doubt that, considering the very aggressive level of transmission of the virus throughout the north, additional measures are necessary.”
He said it “makes perfect sense” to have an Ireland-wide approach to the pandemic and the way the numbers in the Republic are growing “we are probably a week or maybe ten days maximum behind the North” in terms of transmission.
McDonald said he hasn’t seen any great evidence that transmission levels in Dublin have declined after more than three weeks at Level 3.
I have been very concerned to hear the news from many of our nursing homes, we know what happened last spring, we agreed that it was an absolute scandal what happened, we also said it would not happen again. I am very concerned that we are seeing outright anguish and trauma in our nursing homes again. So we must evaluate these things and we must act.
Tánaiste Leo Varadkar acknowledged this morning that while the growth rate in Dublin had slowed, “that’s not good enough.”
“We would have preferred to see that drop,” he said.
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Tomorrow, the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) will meet to discuss the latest modeling data, and Varadkar said this “will help us frame decisions.”
He said the Taoiseach will be in Brussels on Friday for a meeting with the European Council so that decisions can be made over the weekend.
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