Virologist says tackling Covid-19 should be co-ordinated on an all-Ireland basis

Measures to lift the lockdown imposed to tackle coronavirus in Ireland should be co-ordinated on an all-island basis, according to a Belfast virologist who is researching the virus.

Dr Connor Bamford, from the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine at Queen's University, Belfast, said "we could have been lucky" around the timing of the introduction of the lockdown in both jurisdictions, but there was "no reason to think we might be lucky again".

He said the situation North and South was similar. "A couple of weeks ago people were really trying to read into these numbers and really criticising the Northern Ireland response, but if you look at the numbers they're broadly similar and are going the right way."

A lockdown, he said, had a greater impact in areas where the virus was less established; when the UK introduced its lockdown Northern Ireland benefited because at that point it had relatively few reported cases.

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Equally, the North “probably benefited from the early and quite robust approach that the Republic took, but there’s no evidence to say that anything Northern Ireland did has really contributed to a major difference,” he said.

“For a while people were concerned that there were big differences in strategies [North and South] and we weren’t really using the island as an advantage, but the real numbers look like they’re the same, and we don’t know why that is.

“Is it because we were lucky? In hindsight would we maybe be more careful, but all these things are going to be more important when we think about how we’re going to get out of lockdown, and how we might respond to another wave of the epidemic.”

Treatments

Dr Bamford is part of a team which is trying to find out if existing treatments will work against coronavirus, also known as Covid-19. Other colleagues are researching the genome sequencing of the virus, and the university is also leading a trial into stem cell therapy.

By Wednesday evening the Republic had recorded 235 deaths, as compared to 78 in Northern Ireland, which has a population approximately a third the size of that of the South.

There have been 1,339 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Northern Ireland, but Dr Bamford said this figure was “massively underestimating” the numbers who have had the virus at some point, which he put at approximately 100,000.

This is positive: “Most people didn’t even know they had it, so most people are going to be okay.”

The two jurisdictions have followed different approaches to tackling the pandemic, with the Republic sticking closely to World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations, while the UK, including Northern Ireland, took an approach which has involved, for example, less testing, which has created sharp tensions in the North's Executive.

An analysis of the number of deaths among coronavirus patients, North and South, shows that “the slope of that line is looking quite the same in both”, said Dr Bamford. “The outbreaks are evolving at the same time. It looks the same.”

The virus also appears to be slowing in both jurisdictions, as has been noted by the chief medical officers. “It looks like the lockdown is working.”

However, he warned that the numbers of deaths were still likely to rise.

“People who are dying now are still those people who were infected before lockdown, so we’re going to see them increase in the next couple of weeks and then, hopefully, it will go down. How fast it will go down depends on how well the lockdown worked.”

Inconsistencies

There are also inconsistencies in the spread of the virus which could help inform the response. In the North the majority of cases are in Belfast and the surrounding area.

“It is mainly in the east rather than in the west. All the western regions have been quite different, quite low, so it’s spreading differently, and we don’t really know why.

“This might be really important because you might want to put extra focus on places like Belfast that really do need more help, not having a blanket Northern Ireland response.”

He said a vaccine was still probably at least a year away, but tests which identify whether people have had the virus “might be a way out of lockdown”.

“You could find people who are immune, and they could help bring things back.”