From sun holidays to a night out – what Covid-19 experts are missing in the pandemic
WHAT are Ireland’s Covid-19 experts, who have become household names over the past year, missing most during the pandemic?
What difference do they think vaccines will make?
Do they believe we can ever return to normal?
It’s too early to loosen the shackles of lockdown but for the first time, people can dream of some liberty, even if the light is still in the distance.
It turns out that it’s the simple things that our experts miss. Professor Jack Lambert, of UCD, who works in infectious diseases said: “The way I alleviate the stress of my job is I disappear twice a year to a warm sunny place and read a novel and sit by the pool. I miss that opportunity.”
He added: “It’s hard for me to watch children lose an education and miss out on all the opportunities that face-to-face education provides.”
Professor Kingston Mills
of the School of Biochemistry and Immunology, in Trinity College, said he had not seen his daughter who is in Boston since the Christmas before last due to the pandemic.
Professor Anthony Staines
of Dublin City University, a leading advocate of zeroCovid, said he missed going out for a nice meal with his wife Una, or to the cinema or live theatre.
“I miss not being able to plan a holiday, even in Ireland and I miss not seeing my mother and my brothers.”
Professor Sam McConkey,
infectious diseases consultant in Beaumont Hospital, misses seeing his family and socialising but he also longs for trips out in the sea on dinghies and small keel boats.
“I am sustained by the memory of a lovely run down the length of Lough Derg to Holy Island,” he said.
Belfast-born Professor Martin McKee, a professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, would like to be able to visit museums or restaurants.
He used to attend conferences abroad very frequently but “now I spend 12-14 hours a day in front of a screen, every day”.
Mr McKee said Covid-19 vaccines were a really important part of a comprehensive strategy to end the pandemic.
“But it is only one part. While everyone who has received it can now be reassured that they are very unlikely to become severely ill or die, and while we have encouraging signs from Israel that it will reduce transmission, we will really only see the benefits for society once almost everyone has been vaccinated,” he said.
“There is an enormous difference in risks indoors and outdoors and I would not be happy to be indoors with a large number of other people until I was confident that the vast majority had been vaccinated and the pandemic was under control.”
Mr Mills said if you stop infection with the vaccine, you stop transmission.
“There are reports of vaccines preventing infection which is great.”
Mr Lambert said we were going to have fewer new infections as a function of the vaccine.
“Vaccines are a way of achieving herd immunity and the sooner they are rolled out, there will be less spread of the virus and less mutations.”
Mr Mills said how soon we could travel abroad again depended on the availability of vaccines and whether there were problems with new variants of the virus.
Mr McKee said: “We need to drive cases down to very low levels and keep them there. Then, it is entirely possible for people to travel between those countries that have achieved this. This already happens with New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.”
Mr Lambert pointed out travel was “not the major source of transmission in Ireland at the present time”.
As we get the numbers down, there needs to be a plan with proper testing and Covid prevention both for those within Ireland and for those travelling into the country.
We need to get Irish people behind a detailed and transparent plan to live with Covid19 safely and engage them to the part of the solution while vaccines are rolled out.
Mr Mills said that the big variable was the mutated strains of the virus, which might be more infectious and potentially impact the efficacy of vaccines.
“If we did not have the variants I would be much more optimistic about it later this year. That is the big unknown.”
Mr McKee said: “I think it would be a mistake if we felt that we could or should go back to the situation we were in before the pandemic.”
Mr McConkey cautioned in the future it would be a “new normal” and there was no going back to 2019 for the foreseeable future.
He said how much social distancing rules could be dropped depended on the more infectious UK variant now predominant here.
Mr Lambert said the virus was all over the world. “The EU and USA will be in a much better place due to vaccines but they must be available to the Third World.
“That is my worry. There may be big pockets of coronavirus in poorer countries and it may take years to get them under control.
“This virus in poorer countries can be imported into the EU. Also vaccines are the answer, but in the meantime we are the answer.”