The Health Service Executive’s (HSE) chief clinical officer, Dr Colm Henry has said the health service has been "recalibrated" because of Covid-19.
New public health teams have been built in the community and other forms of care in the community have had to be introduced because of the virus, he told Newstalk Breakfast.
These changes have become “part of the journey we’re on,” he added.
Incidents that would have been considered “normal” in the past such as patients on trolleys and crowded accident and emergency departments could not happen any longer, he said, and rightly so because they were “so dangerous”.
When asked about the results of an opinion poll conducted by The Irish Times on Covid-19, Dr Henry said he understood there was a degree of lockdown fatigue and that he would love to be in a position to give good news.
New variants
Unfortunately there continued to be worries because of the possibility of new variants, but he hoped that once older people and the vulnerable were vaccinated there would be a reduction in hospitalisations and deaths.
The arrival of new variants through international travel meant that public health teams were doing “a huge amount of work” in contact tracing and testing, while also relying on people to self-isolate.
The reopening of schools was “unequivocally the right direction”, he said.
Meanwhile, on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, the HSE’s chief executive Paul Reid said that everybody was “working around the clock” to ensure the success of the vaccination roll out.
Vaccination passports were a key feature of the plans, he said. Design and details had been built into the system and the HSE was awaiting a Government decision on the issue.
Mr Reid also welcomed the National Immunisation Advisory Committee's (NIAC) recommendations on vaccinating people with chronic health conditions, adding that a model for delivery of the vaccine to such patients, included identifying the appropriate settings for vaccinating such complex cases, is now being developed.
