TESTING TIMES
Sligo’s first testing centre for the Covid-19 virus opens at the Clarion Road
HUNDREDS of people throughout the county will be tested for the Covid-19 virus in the coming days at its first testing here.
The centre at a HSE building on the Clarion Road in Sligo opened last Friday and is taking patients upon referral from GPs. It is not a drive through centre like in other parts of the country with the patient entering the building for testing after being greeted by medical personnel. The test takes a few minutes and patients are informed in a couple of days of the result. Health officials have said that the waiting time for a test is between four to five days but it has been up to seven days in some cases and around 40,000 people are currently waiting for one. Patients are notified by text of the date and time of their having first contacted their GP by phone to outline their symptoms. There are three confirmed cases of Covid-19 to date in Sligo.
HIS father was a Garda in Tubbercurry and his mother still lives in Bellaghy, Charlestown and is one of the leading medics in the world who is tackling the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr Michael Ryan (55) is the executive director of the World Health Organisation’s ( WHO) Health Emergencies Programme.
His daily briefings of the current coronavirus pandemic have won him admirers all over the world.
Dr Ryan has years of experience fighting ebola and his advice to governments about tackling Covid-19 was to the point.
“What I have learned from all of these outbreaks is that you need to act quickly.
“You need to go after the virus, you need to go and stop the chains of transmission, engage with communities very deeply.
“Community acceptance is very important. You need to be co-ordinated, coherent.
“Some of the lessons I have learned after so many ebola outbreaks in my career are.... be fast, have no regrets.
“You must be the first mover, the virus will always get you if you don’t move quickly and you need to be prepared.
“One of the good things in emergency response is if you need to be right before you move you will never win.
“Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to emergency management. Speed trumps perfection.
“The problem in society we have at the moment is everyone is afraid for making a mistake, everyone is afraid of the consequence of error but the greatest error is not to move.
“The greatest error is to be paralysed by the fear of failure, thats the single biggest lesson I’ve learned from the ebola responses in the past,” he said.
On Sunday, Dr Ryan told Andrew Marr on his BBC morning show that countries could not simply lock down their societies to defeat coronavirus, adding that public health measures are needed to avoid a resurgence of the virus later on.
He said: “What we really need to focus on is finding those who are sick, those who have the virus, and isolate them, find their contacts and isolate them,” in an interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
“The danger right now with the lockdowns ... if we don’t put in place the strong public health measures now, when those movement restrictions and lockdowns are lifted, the danger is the disease will jump back up.”
Mr Ryan said that the examples of China, Singapore and South Korea, which coupled restrictions with rigorous measures to test every possible suspect, provided a model for
Europe, which the WHO has said has replaced Asia as the epicentre of the pandemic.
“Once we’ve suppressed the transmission, we have to go after the virus. We have to take the fight to the virus,” Mr Ryan said.
Mr Ryan also said that several vaccines were in development, but only one had begun trials in the United States.
Asked how long it would take before there was a vaccine available, he said that people needed to be realistic.
“We have to make sure that it’s absolutely safe... we are talking at least a year,” he said. “The vaccines will come, but we need to get out and do what we need to do now.”
Dr Ryan’s father, Tom grew up in Tubbercurry and moved to Charlestown on marrying Meta and the couple ran The Ship Inn there for many years.
Following his dad’s death in the 1970s when Michael was around eight, the family moved down the road to Curry.