Guarding the vulnerable and the aged

Dear Editor,

While the risk from Covid is predominantly age and comorbidity related, it is also undoubtedly exposure related. We are told to keep your distance, wear your mask and maintain separation even outdoors, in order to reduce transmission. There is therefore increased risk for those like SNAs, carers and some teachers who cannot keep two metre distance, their patients cannot mask and who work indoors in crowded situations for extended periods.

The gardai, teachers and family carers are readily identifiable, so there are no difficulties contacting them. There are 15k Gardaí and 82k registered teachers and SNAs in the country. There are also an estimated 500k family carers. If the HSE will have 1.2m vaccines in April then it would take 0.6, 2.1 and 12.9 days to vaccinate the gardai, teachers and SNAs and carers respectively.

There are also approx. 500k people with underlying illness of whom almost 40k have been vaccinated along with 210k over 75s, leaving 250k remaining, all of whom could be vaccinated in 7 days.

If vaccines were run in two streams in parallel, one occupational and one underlying illness, all of these who want the vaccine in those groups could be vaccinated once by the end of April along with 400k second jabbers. While these are approximate numbers, this is surely do-able.

The government is now hiding behind NIAC’s new age based health vaccine list, when the truth is that there was a systems failure in the HSE and so-called health experts not being able to identify persons with underlying illness in group 4 of the vaccine rollout. If reduced transmission is the focus, those with obvious increased risk of exposure and therefore transmission should be vaccinated in parallel with the age related cohort.

Kevin T Finn, Kingston Close, Mitchelstown.