We’ll control this, but only if people stay in their homes

WE ARE beginning to see a surge in coronavirus cases in Ireland, and the best defence the public has is to stay at home. On the HSE website there were about 70 admissions to critical care in the last week or so, and that’s just about right in terms of the published data.

We know that about 4% of people require admission to critical care, so 4% of 2,000 cases would roughly be about 80.

As far as I know there are about 70 to 75 people admitted to intensive care and we also know, from what has happened in other countries, that these patients get sick quickly, they get sick together and they present all together.

What we’re trying to do is to prevent these people all getting sick at the same time because we don’t want that to happen.

We need people to stay at home, do what they are asked to do and slow the surge, and drop that curve that we keep talking about.

There is also another line in that curve and it is the finite resource, the critical care resource or the hospital resource, and we have done a lot of work in trying to ensure that we increase the number of beds that we have.

We have done that for the past four weeks but it is really important to remember that we came from a very low base.

We have fewer beds than other European countries, so we’re doing our level best to increase our capacity, but very quickly.

So we will increase our capacity but we have a finite resource and we need the population to understand two things.

First, if you don’t get the disease then you presumably won’t need admission and to do that you must stay home.

Second, the resource is finite and we need to ensure that we have enough beds, if at all possible, for those people who get sick.

The only way to do that is for people to stay at home.

We can double our bed numbers, I would imagine with reasonable confidence, and I would imagine with a reasonable standard of care.

Beyond that it will get very difficult. We have acutely upskilled staff and we are finding more equipment, we are finding more places in the hospitals to ventilate people. But we cannot, beyond doubling our numbers, totally guarantee that we will be able to care for everybody if they don’t stay at home.

If they stay at home and if they don’t present acutely, we will, please God, cope. But the coping mechanism here is not in our hands; it’s in the population’s hands. We cannot control it. The people at home can control it.

Dr Motherway was speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland during the week