A group of medical professionals has questioned the National Public Health Emergency Team’s “outdated” strategy for tackling Covid-19 in Ireland.
The group has signed a White Paper questioning the country’s public health strategy for the virus and calling for Nphet to rethink its approach.
Among the signees is infectious diseases expert Professor Jack Lambert, who said a solution must be found that does not focus exclusively on Covid-19 at "the expense of everything else".
“There’s no issue with Nphet, Nphet have their role,” he said.
“They are public health groups – but we need to actually make decisions not just with public health groups and modellers, there needs to be kind of, a multi-disciplinary group decision-making team involved in all of this."
This is a scary virus - obviously opening up the country, letting everybody get it is not a solution
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Prof Lambert said the White Paper was not advocating for a strategy of herd immunity or a reopening of the country without regard for public health measures.
Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Today with Claire Byrne show, Prof Lambert said: “This is a scary virus - obviously opening up the country, letting everybody get it is not a solution, this is never what the White Paper has said.”
“This is a very dangerous virus and look what's happening in America, in parts of Europe where they have better infrastructure, we're all aware of this," he said, adding that Covid-19 is five times more lethal than influenza.
“But the solution is not to focus exclusively on Covid at the expense of everything else. This is what the White Paper is saying,” he said.
“Other things are suffering and you have to do things hand in hand safely and engage people who have the expertise in Covid, in the economy and community settings. This is the message here.”
Lockdown cycle
Prof Lambert called for improved plans on ICU bed capacity, international travel and the distribution of a potential vaccine.
“The reality is Covid is going to be with us for a long time and we did a good job in the first wave of suppressing the virus by lockdown, but moving forward we need to have a plan to avoid lockdown,” he said.
“Moving forward we can't use lockdown as a repeated solution... we need to find a way of getting everyone at the table together with all the appropriate expertise to problem solve.”
Biochemistry expert Professor Tómas Ryan told the same programme he had “some degree of scepticism” to the proposals in the White Paper: “They seem to be wanting a sort of a goldilocks zone where we can open up but not deal with the virus, and there just isn't any country on earth that's managed to do that.”
We have to make a choice. You can have travel quarantine or you can have lockdown but you can't have neither
However, he added “we all want the same thing, we all want to have a functional society and we all want to avoid a third lockdown.”
“With the current strategy - if you can call it a strategy - we're going to moving in and out of lockdowns for the rest of the pandemic,” he said.
Prof Ryan said the reason Ireland was leading in Europe with regard to the number of cases was because the country was “good at doing lockdown.”
“Our travel situation is a shambles, we are not regulating it at all. We have to make a choice. You can have travel quarantine or you can have lockdown but you can't have neither,” he said.
