It seems we are just gearing up in all of this
THERE’S a definite sense of our health services gearing up this week for a huge surge in the number of Covid-19 cases in the county. Major reconfiguration has taken place at Sligo University Hospital as you can see elsewhere in this week’s edition.
A second Covid-19 screening centre is opening and local hotels are likely to be used in the coming days as isolation units.
Coupled with the restrictions announced by An Taoiseach last Friday one certainly gets the feeling that we’re just starting out in this battle.
And, of course our frontline staff, pictured in this week’s The Sligo Champion are the real heroes in all of this.
As has been stated many times over, all we are being asked to do is to stay at home, they have to go head on with this horrendous virus.
They deserve all our assistance and respect in the very difficult weeks and months ahead.
Over the past couple of weeks, they’ve had to worry about enough supplies of personal protection equipment and this should never have been the case.
Hopefully, the supplies being sent now from China will address that issue which should never have arisen in the first place, especially as we had been told by Government that the country had been planning for this for a long time, as far back as January.
It remains to be seen how well our health service will cope with the epidemic in the coming weeks. It won’t be for the want of trying by our frontline workers if we fail.
On that note it was interesting to hear Sligo native, Dr Mike Ryan of the World Health Organisation during the week that we need, looking to the future in order to deal with emergencies such as Covid-19, healthcare systems that aren’t already working at 100% capacity. Ours certainly has been.
And, then there’s compliance. Two weeks ago it was the teenagers everyone was giving out about, this week it’s the over 70s who won’t stay at home. I look at Sweden and they are adopting a different approach, the primary schools are still open and it’s like business as usual there.
Who is right? Nobody really knows. We certainly have draconian measures in place now in Ireland and the big question is are people prepared to be even more restricted in the coming weeks?