The outrage over footage of COVID-19 breaches at a busy Dublin venue over the weekend are “very much a distraction” to the wider problems with the pandemic response.
Dr Tomás Ryan, Associate Professor at the School of Biochemistry and Immunology in Trinity College says the Government needs to take drastic action to stop the country “sliding backwards” towards the early days of the outbreak.
The National Public Health Emergency Team is meeting this afternoon to discuss the latest surges in COVID-19 cases and is expected to issue fresh advice later.
On The Pat Kenny Show this morning, Dr Ryan said footage of barman pouring alcohol into people’s mouths at the Berlin D2 restaurant on Friday is distracting people form the real issues facing the country.
“What happened in Berlin Bar and what is happening in social gatherings around the country; obviously, it is worrying but I think it is very much a distraction,” he said.
“It is a distraction from the major issues of how we are handling the country.
“You are always going to get people who are misbehaving but the situation we should be implementing needs to be robust to that – and currently it is not.”
Zero-COVID
Dr Ryan has for weeks been calling the island of Ireland to eliminate the virus entirely so we can fully reopen schools and businesses.
He said that option is still on the table, although he noted it is getting “more difficult each day.”
“At the moment, I feel like we need to take drastic action, regardless of whether we choose to go for a zero-COVID strategy and open up the economy – because that is what it is about – or we choose to live with the virus,” he said.
“Because right now we are not doing either. Right now, it feels very much like we are just sliding backwards.”
Government response
He said the entire national strategy needs to be redesigned from the top down.
“Everything has been too little too late,” he said. “We have been avoiding difficult choices.
“We have not been thinking from a perspective of regret minimisation – by that I mean imagining ourselves at Christmas, thinking about what could we have done in Summer to prepare for this – and instead we have been working from an attitude of effort minimisation.”
Dr Ryan said people can improve the country’s chances by improving mask usage, reporting symptoms early, getting tested early and isolating when they are ill.
He warned that when it comes down to it, “Really the rest of it is on the State.”
“It is on the Government to implement a more effective strategy,” he said.
“I think that means a stronger testing, trace, isolation infrastructure – it is still too slow, it still does not have a high enough capacity and we are basically doing nothing to contain the virus right now.”
“So, the one thing that we could really improve on at an implementation level, regardless of what your strategy is, is improving the testing situation.”
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