UCC professor believes the eradication of COVID19 possible in Ireland before the end of the summer
ELIMINATING COVID-19 from Ireland over the course of the summer is possible and would require only a modest amount of additional effort, according to new modelling analyses conducted by UCC infectious disease expert Professor Gerry Killeen.
Professor Killeen said that it was likely that COVID-19 would establish itself as a permanent disease with unpredictable waves every few years.
The UCC medical boffin warned that repeatedly imposing, lifting and re-imposing restrictions to merely suppress the epidemic until it hopefully burns itself may prove a dangerous gamble.
According to Professor Killeen, who holds the AXA Research Chair in Applied Pathogen Ecology in UCC, more stringent and effective restrictions and measures now could shorten the time to the complete suppression of the disease.
As Ireland begins to gradually emerge from lock-down, Professor Killeen has appealed for sustained and enhanced measures to completely eliminate the virus.
“The quiet tail of a fading epidemic may be just as dangerous as the silent onset,” Prof Killeen warned,
He added that Ireland should look to countries with ambitious national strategies to crush the curve of their epidemics.
He includes China, South Korea, Japan and Australia among such countries.
“With their approaches to eliminating the virus with sustained and uninterrupted restrictions, their time-lines to that exit point are about three months and New Zealand is already there,” he said.
“Countries like Ireland, France, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom, where daily incidence rates have been slowly falling, may well have achieved 80 per cent suppression of transmission,” the professor added.