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THE GOVERNMENT HAS gone against the advice given by NPHET to move the entire country to Level 5, and has instead chosen to enforce a Level 3 nationwide for three weeks.
Ministers have tried to explain the reasons for rejecting this advice last night and this morning.
In a meaningful interview on RTÉ’s Claire Byrne Live show last night, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said there were three main reasons why the government rejected the Level 5 recommendation.
People will lose their jobs
The first were the broader social impacts of the lockdown, such as hundreds of thousands losing jobs, businesses potentially closing permanently, and implications for mental health.
Varadkar said “it’s not just about a virus,” death rates or statistics, it’s about how it “impacts so many different people and so many different communities in so many different ways.”
The Irish Restaurant Association has said that Level 3 restrictions alone will mean that 180,000 people will lose their jobs, due to the restrictions that make people only able to eat outdoors in restaurants and cafes and other sectors of the hospitality industry.
At level 5, only essential retailers could remain open.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin made a similar comment in his address to the nation last night: “It is not about public health and business competing with each other, it is about lives and livelihoods. We can’t have one without the other. “
It’s not what the plan is
The second was that the recommendation was “not in line” with the Living with Covid plan that the government had agreed to with NPHET.
When the five-tier plan was announced last month, the Taoiseach said that “the higher tiers will be used to address a higher incidence of the disease.”
Moving from one to the other would be based on a number of factors, including the 14-day and seven-day figures for new cases, the five-day moving average of cases, by county and nationally.
Specifically for Level 5, NPHET said that trigger points include: “high or rapidly increasing” disease incidence, multiple clusters, factors such as the R number, and the number of positive cases.
Also included in your criteria for moving to Level 5 are: a high or rapidly increasing number of deaths, a significant or rapid increase in admissions to the hospital and ICU, and the likelihood of the hospital or care capacity being exceeded critics.
Varadkar said there was “no sudden change in the last three days” when NPHET last said that there was no need to move the entire country to Level 3, which legitimized the move from Level 3 to Level 5.
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Hospital capacity has not been overwhelmed
The third was NPHET’s assessment that hospitals were imminently facing the possibility of being overwhelmed, but HSE CEO Paul Reid did not share this view, as HSE had not previously been consulted on this issue.
The capacity of the Intensive Care Unit, seen as a key metric to assess the severity of severity of the impact of Covid-19 in a country, was a particular focus.
NPHET said that admissions to critical care services have increased to an average of two a day, with 243 of the 281 critical care beds now occupied.
Only 1%, or around 20 of these beds, are occupied by Covid-19 patients.
If current trends continue, NPHET said that by November 7, between 1,600 and 2,300 cases of Covid-19 will be reported per day, and 43 people per day will be admitted to the hospital.
But the government insists there is additional capacity there if needed: including a temporary increase capacity of up to 354 ICU beds and the ability to ventilate up to 1,000 patients, if needed.
With reporting by Sean Murray and Orla Dwyer
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