Professor Alan Barrett this afternoon

This afternoon.

At a Special Covid Committee meeting in Dáil Éireann.

[Non-medical] Professor Alan Barrett, Director of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) spoke about the possibility of ‘geographical lockdowns’ and ‘surgical interventions’.

He said:

“That notion of having much more sort of targeted lockdowns and, I remember this came up in a discussion that one of my colleagues sitting around the table discussing epidemiology matters was making the point that when you have viruses in animals. OK, it’s very, very clear, you sort of lockdown the group of animals or whatever like that. And you just make sure they don’t move around.

Now at the time it sort of seemed inconceivable that we would think about a human virus in the same way we would think about a virus affecting animals.

But I think, you know, we can actually imagine a situation that geographically, in some shape or form, if a virus could be contained, it would be better to contain one part of the country rather than the whole area or the whole country.

“So I certainly think we should be moving in a direction of having much more sort of surgical lockdowns … surgical interventions to the extent that we can.”

Hmm.

Meanwhile….

Orla writes:

‘I’ve been wondering if people have considered changing where they live because of Covid and in case there’s another pandemic down the road..feels like there might be some kind of virus decentralisation.’

Anyone?