Top Irish WHO doctor says 'No more Level 5' lockdown says and that 'this should be the last'
Ireland should not return to lockdown after the Level Five restrictions currently in place are lifted, the Executive Director of the World Health Organisation's Health Emergencies Programme said.
Dr Mike Ryan, from Sligo, said the easing of restrictions must be carefully managed to ensure that Irish people are not forced to go back to living in lockdown in the future, The Irish Star reports.
It comes as a further 57 deaths to COVID-19 were reported on Wednesday, bringing the death toll to 4,036.
A further 650 cases of COVID-19 were confirmed, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 211,751.
Dr Ryan, who is leading the WHO’s response against COVID-19 said that this lockdown should be the last.
He said Governments and health authorities should focus on restricting the movements of people who are sick rather than everybody’s movements going forward.
Speaking as he was awarded the Romero Award from Trocaire at the launch of the charity’s annual Lenten Appeal yesterday (WED), he said: “We were down, in Ireland and in Europe, to cases in the single digits of countries and less than probably 100 cases a day on certain days across the whole of Europe and the disease reestablished itself.
“We need to make sure when we come out of this phase of lockdown that we don't have to go back and that we're a little bit more measured and a little bit more flexible and agile and how we respond to clusters in future.
“I've said this since the beginning; if you focus on cases and contacts and you focus on clusters, you focus on restricting the movement of people who are sick or their contacts.
“Then you don't have to restrict the movement of all of society.
“So many countries have shown that if you keep the numbers low, that good strong public health measures now linked to vaccination can give us solid control of this virus.
“It will become just another virus in our lives. It will require a sustained monitoring.
“It will require evolution of vaccination. It will require lots and lots and lots of things but we can bring normality to our response and vaccines are a huge part.
“We need to do it smarter. We need to do it in a more agile way.“And we do need to focus on getting key aspects of our society back up and running, particularly education.
“We need to prioritise that as soon as we possibly can.”
He added: “There is a lot of kinetic energy left in this virus and if we just open our societies, the virus will spread again unrestricted and it will find all of those unvaccinated individuals and will still cause massive disruption in our society.
"We need to be very careful this time around in lifting restrictions. We need to balance that against the epidemiology.
“We need to keep up the effort of trying to continue to stop transmission.
“I do think we need to prioritise getting our kids back to school, keep getting our essential health services back on track, ensuring our social services and our mental health services and others are available to people who are suffering.
“We may have to put our social lives a little bit on hold as we calibrate our opening with vaccination and protection.
Dr Ryan also said Irish people have done their part in stopping the spread of COVID-19 by crushing the curve three times.
He said: “Ireland has done has done very well.
“And I mean that, not as Irish government or Irish scientists.
“I mean the Irish people have done as well as anybody else to crush the curve three times and do that actually quite quickly each time.
“We've also been more efficient than most others shutting down that transmission when it reached a certain level.
“It’s taken a huge commitment on behalf of Irish society to achieve that.”