Government ‘acted in good faith’ with best advice available at start of pandemic - geriatrician

Consultant geriatrician Dr Ronan Collins has defended the Government’s response to Covid-19 following criticism that their response was led by fear rather than science.

“I think the Government acted in good faith with the best available advice at the time. And I also think that maybe when you look at our death rates compared to other European countries, the Government’s policy would have shown at least that it didn’t fail. I’m not saying it succeeded, but it didn’t fail,” he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland.

Criticisms of Ireland’s pandemic response emerged at the weekend, which were made by former National Public Health Emergency Team member Prof Martin Cormican in a paper to the Irish Society of Clinical Microbiologists last November.

According to Prof Cormican, Ireland focused too much on short-term metrics such as case numbers and mortality, imposed measures that “excessively limited basic freedoms” for too long and failed to take adequate account of the “collateral damage” to health and wellbeing, especially on those who were already vulnerable or disadvantaged.

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Dr Collins, who is the HSE’s lead on stroke treatment, acknowledged that he had been very alarmed and concerned at the start of the pandemic with calls for the elderly to cocoon.

“I think Martin’s (Cormican) comments about decisions being driven by fear, I think that’s true. But then again, when I reflect personally, I think we were all frightened. When I first saw those scenes myself in Lombardy and being a working doctor and having a spouse who is a working doctor, there was tremendous fear about what this might mean and the risk personally,” he said.

Dr Collins said that eventually science reacted “amazingly quickly” with the speedy development of a vaccine. “But in the early stages, the science was confused, I think, and difficult to interpret. But I think there is a truism and saying as well that I suppose before you implemented such draconian measures, you had to have some very strong scientific evidence behind it that it’s going to have a good impact. And that wasn’t clear at the time. But, you know, it was such a fearful time.”

When asked about a letter from the Chief Medical Officer Dr Breda Smyth expressing concern that some old people have not yet resumed normal activities, Dr Collins said he thought most people had “come back to life”.

However, this was not just an age related issue, he warned. During the pandemic the evidence had indicated that feelings of depression and feelings of loneliness were actually greater amongst younger groups than amongst older groups.

Dr Collins said he had not been surprised at the levels of deaths from Covid-19 in nursing homes given that people there had complex medical conditions and were more frail.

“I would stress that from a clinical point of view, I don’t think we need an inquiry into how nursing homes were handled. I think we’ve done that already. An expert panel was set up in 2021 to look at the issue of Covid in nursing homes and the very high mortality and indeed the problems that were readily identified and through research and through experience early on. And that panel made its recommendations. And rather than an inquiry, I’d be asking to actually look at those recommendations that were made and how far along the road we are to implementing them.”