Lockdown should not be lifted until daily coronavirus cases go below ten per day, according to Trinity Professor Aoife McLysaght.
Last night, health officials warned that 44% of Ireland’s confirmed cases have been reported in the past two weeks.
Modelling suggests that, within days, the country will have seen more cases in the first three weeks of this year than in the whole of last year.
'Lockdown yo-yo'
On The Pat Kenny Show this morning, Professor McLysaght said we are now in the “worst and deepest crisis we have been in since the pandemic started.”
She said this latest lockdown was avoidable and it is essential that the Government learns the lessons needed to get the country out of its “lockdown yo-yo.”
“Leo Varadkar said businesses should not expect to be open before end of March, that is quite long and that is really unfortunate because we didn’t need to be here,” she said.
“But now that we are here, we really do have to make it our last lockdown. That means getting our numbers low – probably less than ten per day.
“It means resourcing our public health doctors so they can do all the wonderful work they are capable of, which includes outbreak containment. They can do really good contact tracing – not on thousands of cases a day; on a small number of cases per day and go back over a much longer period of time, so we really catch everyone connected.
“We also have to cut off the incoming supply. We have to have quarantine.”
The roads are too busy
Lockdown 1 was a ghost town with just essential workers
Buzzing on the roads in this morning
Our ICUs are heaving & the impact of the high case numbers last week hasn’t hit them yet due to lag bw diagnosis/admission/deterioration
Stay home, HCWs can’t pic.twitter.com/TGEvASrBUe
— Gabrielle Colleran (@ProfSuperJunior) January 15, 2021
Professor McLysaght said it is “very unfortunate” that the country’s hospitals units are now entering surge capacity protocols.
She said Government must now ensure that lockdown is not the only option on the table when it comes to controlling the virus moving forward.
“We can have a 2021 where we get the country open and get back to lots of the normal activities that we all miss,” she said.
“It has almost been a year now that we have been dealing with this in Ireland and people are very tired of it – I know that, I am tired of it too.
“I think we need to explain to people what the reward is; that we are going to go through this lockdown but we are going to do it right this time.
“We are not going to mess it up. We are not going to use lockdown as if it is the only tool in our kit.
“We have the lockdown but we also have our public health doctors who can do amazing work; we have quarantine and we know the vaccine is coming – and that is an important element in our toolkit.”
Vaccine
She said it will take most of the year to get sufficient numbers of people vaccinated and we now have to decide how we want to spend that year.
“We can either say we’ll spend that year in and out of lockdown or we have a lockdown that works because we follow up with the other measures and then we spend the rest of the year living with more minor inconveniences in terms of daily life and live 2021 in a much more open way,” she said.
