Interesting that TCD in Dublin is doing this:
Trinity College Dublin has "strongly encouraged" students to wear face masks in lectures, labs, tutorials and libraries, as Covid-19, influenza and RSV continue to circulate.
Students return to the campus today and received an email on Friday around the mask-wearing advice.
They said that widespread mask-wearing will protect the "medically vulnerable" members of the college community.
And:
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Medical Director at the College Health Service David McGrath said that communications were sent to students before Christmas "about the likelihood of significant problems" in the health system because of the respiratory illnesses.
"It's important to us now that our students are returning, just really to update them on the situation and also to realise that many, many of our students are not from Ireland and might have been at home for Christmas, might have no idea what's happening now."
But doesn't this all feel a bit piecemeal. One would have thought that Government might have taken a lead in implementing very strong masking recommendations (at their mildest) in areas like education, health and transport given the severity of what has been experienced across Christmas and into the New Year. The point isn't perfection or blanket proscriptions - it is to mitigate in areas where such mitigation is possible and easy to do so. With little or no masking we've seen the health service significantly impaired - with the imposition of some measures it is highly plausible that a percentage of that impairment might be done away with.
And let's keep in mind how bad the situation in the health service remains. Paul Cullen in the IT made much this week of how numbers had fallen in hospitals. But read the actual figures and put yourself in the position of having to be in a hospital and it seems like cold comfort.
Rates of flu and other non-Covid respiratory viruses have been falling, further easing the pressure on hospitals. On Sunday, there were 237 patients waiting for a bed in hospital emergency departments, according to the Health Service Executive's TrolleyGar count, well down on the 389 trolleys recorded a week earlier. Sunday's figure is down about 20 per cent on the same day last year but more than twice the figure recorded two years ago.
It includes 12 patients in children's hospitals, compared with just one on the same day two years ago.
Keep in mind too how this impacts on all health care at the sharp end. You might go in with a condition entirely distinct from Covid or flu or RSVs but due to the pressures extant your health care could be impacted. When the pandemic started it struck me that it was a bad time to be ill. During periods like this it is clear that hasn't changed much.
On another point this is useful, but what possessed the Government to think it was a good idea to put 23% of Covid test kits?
There will be a zero VAT rate on Covid-19 tests kits once again, Minister for Finance Michael McGrath has announced this evening.
The price of antigen tests had risen dramatically since the start of this year after VAT was charged at 23% on the tests.
This followed the ending of a European Commission derogation introduced during the pandemic.
However, following extensive discussions between Revenue and Minister McGrath it has been agreed to return the VAT rate to zero immediately.
The tests are expensive - had to purchase them in the run-up to the bout of Covid at Christmas, and interesting how no-one talks about just how expensive, not just in terms of time, but in terms of medicine and tests the whole process is. All too often 'learning to live with Covid' appears to be 'let's just ignore it entirely'. That doesn't work. There's too large a cohort of people who remain uniquely vulnerable.
For example on This Week in Virology this weekend Dr. Daniel Griffin made the point that this wave of Covid is primarily one that impacts disproportionately on those over 70. Whereas previous waves saw a broader range of age-cohorts impacted. And his thought was that the pandemic might be turning into one where Covid will bear down most heavily on those 70 and older. I'm thirteen years from that age group, others I know are closer, further away or in it. But the society has a lot of people already there and older again. This isn't a secret and we come back to the need for mitigations that will make life a little easier for those groups - the small sacrifices that we all have to make to allow them greater autonomy and the knowledge that in extremis the health services are fit and robust when and if they need them.
Which makes one wonder how Michael McGrath could have been part of a process that saw testing kits have VAT slapped onto them.
Thought this is a bit more positive:
The minister said the move was important due to the ongoing circulation of this virus and its significant impacts on the healthcare system.
"In my view costs of such testing kits should be kept to a minimum, and this is the context in which I am zero rating VAT on these products with immediate effect," Minister McGrath said.
Legislation to make this VAT rate permanent is set to go before the Oireachtas soon.
Meanwhile, though one could argue that the evidence is all around:
The Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA), which oversees the safety of vaccines and other medicines in Ireland, has supplied its latest figures to The Irish Times.
Since the vaccines were introduced, 20,758 reports of suspected side effects have been notified to the regulator; only 2,852 reports were received in 2022.
Overall, the reports show the benefits of Covid-19 vaccines outweigh the risks, the authority says.
Up to the end of December the HPRA had received 122 reports of deaths among people who had been vaccinated, out of more than eight million doses administered in the State.
"It can be expected that fatalities due to progression of underlying disease or natural causes will continue to occur, including following vaccination. This does not mean that the vaccine caused the deaths," a spokeswoman said.
And another piece of evidence:
While investigations are continuing to fill in the knowledge gaps around vaccines, amid some concerns over the lack of an evidence base, data shows the risk from Covid greatly exceeds anything posed by vaccines. In England and Wales, for example, more than 160,000 deaths have been registered as being caused by Covid since the start of the pandemic, against 52 registered as caused by a Covid vaccine.
On This Week in Virology the point was made that it is entirely legitimate to raise questions and keep a careful eye on vaccines, sometimes they work imperfectly, or there are problems with them, but given the alternative as exemplified in this instance (and Covid itself causes myocarditis) the necessity for vaccines continues.
No comments:
Post a Comment