Government in charge - reasons why

Dear Editor,

1. The numbers in hospital and ICU and the number of cases and the change in those numbers since last Thursday did not support sudden panic leap to Level 5 over and above the next step in the Living with Covid-19 Plan. NPHET offered no valid rationale, no logical reasons why.

2. The health service is not in imminent danger of being overwhelmed and this view was supposed by the chief executive of the HSE.

3. NPHET’s advice was unbalanced both in medical health terms and in wider societal terms and did not reflect the reality of the need to support both lives and livelihoods.

4. NPHET’s advice

and stage 5 plan would need buy-in by the people and clearly that was not and would not be there.

5. By not going progressively through the stages in the 5 stage plan step by step we would have no inkling of what effect each of the measures in the Living with Covid-19 Plan would have.

6. NPHET’s projections of a massive increase in positive cases took no account of the increased buy-in and compliance by the public to progressing to the next stage in the Plan along with increased enforcement.

7. NPHET could give no guarantee that its Circuit Breaker (CB) plan would work; the CB strategy was not thought through; the CB strategy has not worked elsewhere; NPHET had no plan as to what would happen next whether the CB plan worked or didn’t work and NPHET had no plan B if their CB plan didn’t work.

8. The manner of the giving of the advice by dropping a sudden unjustified and unexpected bombshell without any warning was unprecedented and risked panicking the Government and the country.

The Govern

ment made the right decision to move to Stage 3 of the 5 stage Living with Covid-19 Plan. Now it is up to everyone to back the Government and take individual responsibility to keep the numbers in hospital and in ICU down. That chiefly involves the vulnerable taking extra care and all others adhering to the hygiene and mask wearing etiquette to protect the vulnerable.

Kevin T Finn, Kingston Close,

Mitchelstown.