Lockdown inevitable as we fail on testing
Leading scientist warns: ‘We’re on the brink of losing control of Covid’
A SECOND national lockdown is virtually inevitable unless the Government radically alters its Covid-19 strategy, one of the country’s foremost scientists has predicted.
Professor David McConnell said the continued failure to invest more in testing and tracing would result in another full-scale lockdown this winter.
‘We’re looking at a second total lockdown,’ the recently retired prochancellor of Trinity College Dublin told the Irish Mail on Sunday.
‘I think we will probably lose a lot of control over the next while.
‘Local lockdowns, I don’t think, will really do the job. Dublin – half the country’s population – is now in a very serious situation.
‘I’m very worried because I’m not convinced the Government is going to move in the sort of direction needed.’
Together with a wide range of other leading academics, Prof. McConnell has for months been calling for a seismic policy shift towards an unprecedented testing and tracing regime aimed at eliminating the virus.
‘We might not be able to eliminate the virus in the absolute sense but we can have a policy of eliminating the virus. That’s something entirely different,’ he said.
Prof. McConnell cited New Zealand – which is now fighting its first cluster after 100 days of zero community transmission – as a leading light.
‘They are really throwing everything at it and they will get this cluster down to zero. We’re nowhere near that and I wish we were,’ he said.
‘If we had a situation whereby we were having one or two eruptions every now and then, I’d be very happy, but that’s not what we have. We
have multiple clusters arising all over the country every day and I don’t have any sense that those are being ring-fenced in the way the New Zealanders are doing it.’
He hopes – but does not believe – that next week’s Government roadmap for the next six months will include a commitment to ramp up testing.
And he believes such a hugely increased testing regime could then seize back control of the virus as cases reduced in a new national lockdown.
‘I think we’re looking at a second total lockdown. That would get us down to 10 cases a day and at that time, if we had a really strong test and trace, we can drive it into single units per day and then we can begin to release whole regions. If you’re down to one to two cases per day, substantial regions in the country will have no cases. They could anticipate opening up almost entirely green zones.
‘I see this as the only way in which we will eventually come back towards normal before vaccines become generally available – or before some drugs become generally available.’
Prof. McConnell also said he feared for the societal and political consequences of the National Public Health Emergency Team’s (NPHET) approach.
‘I think NPHET is a one-trick pony. Lockdown then relax – then lockdown – and so on.
‘I think this will mean we will lose public confidence and that will undermine the status of the Government as a whole. That’s very serious,’ he said.
michaelofarrell@newsscoops.org
‘Dublin is now in a very serious situation’