Vaccine won’t solve all the problems that Covid-19 presents

Dear Editor, Vaccines are a marvel of modern medicine and we are all rightfully grateful that they were developed so quickly. We know that they are only one part of an overall strategy to save lives and help us to live together again, yet talk of Vaccines makes up most of the public discussion around ‘The Path Ahead’ - The Government’s new plan for addressing the coronavirus pandemic.

Vaccines alone are not enough. There is much to celebrate in the recent changes in the government approach but the situation can always get worse, so our approach can always get better. We don’t need harsher restrictions, we need more sensible decisions.

The vaccine won’t solve all the problems that Covid-19 presents. We don’t know how well it will work for the new variants being imported daily from around the world due to our lax travel restrictions. We don’t know how well it will work for immunocompromised individuals. And when the vaccine protects you, we don’t yet know for how long.

Even if all our older and vulnerable people got the vaccine and we knew that it worked, the majority of those in ICUs now with Covid-19 are under 65 years old. These people usually recover, but they recover because they receive ICU care. If infections spread more widely in this younger cohort, the small percentages of hospitalisations would become massive numbers. Our hospitals would be overwhelmed, and people might not receive the care that could otherwise save their lives.

Most of what’s needed for us to be Zero has already been done. Let’s not make the same mistakes again, let’s get this right. What we need is mandatory hotel quarantine for all arrivals, investment in track and trace and resourcing of public health teams so we can get the vaccine rolled out in a way that makes sense. The people can get behind anything that makes sense to them.

Yours, Chloe Ni Mhurchu

for ‘We Can Be Zero’ (per e-mail).