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Niall Conroy

29 Nov, 8 tweets, 3 min read

My favourite thing about this week is that the Irish government went to outbreak school 😂 Naturally, the department of finance and Ernst&Young led the teaching. Public health weren’t needed because they had “data guys” instead.....

...The department of finance led with this cracker. Their advanced data mining revealed the presence a link between health, economics and society....

@conorsmith

.....This graph has since been used to estimate the ideal number of deaths in a population. Hat tip to @conorsmith .....

@EoinKr

...@EoinKr has increased the utility of the data by applying it to the field of critical care, saving untold lives....

...Ernst&Young then ran a data collection workshop. Their complex algorithm used many arrows. The debate around the direction of the yellow arrows brought people back to 2015, when nobody could work out what colour that dress was....

EY revealed that ⬆️ covid case numbers in Meath were due to many outbreaks. When asked if it was more likely that the high case numbers actually caused those outbreaks, they produced some very clever graphs, and warned the audience not to be misled by epidemiology lobbyists....

....Then it was time for the exam. It was open book and the following slide, showing restaurants and gyms to be highest risk for covid transmission was provided to candidates. The question read “based on existing data, which industries should we open up first”?......

....Every answer came back the same...”I would open up restaurants and gyms while case numbers are still high”. And that’s what they did. This module, epidemiology 101, will be repeated about 6 weeks after Christmas, when you will have the opportunity to re-sit.

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More from @NICU_doc_salone

Niall Conroy

@NICU_doc_salone

30 Oct

https://twitter.com/imo_irl/status/1321924720888074241

I know a thread on a contractual issue is never going to be one of the greats. But my Irish colleagues might take industrial action and it’s important to tell people why, before inevitable political mudslinging starts. This issue is about pandemic safety, so I’ll try to explain..

https://twitter.com/imo_irl/status/1321924720888074241

@HSE_HR

....in Ireland, when you finish medical school, you can go on and do specialty training. It takes years and there are lots of awful exams, but you get there in the end and you qualify as a consultant. And then the @HSE_HR give you a consultant contract. Except for public health..

....Decades ago, someone in the dept of health decided that public health doctors were so useless as to require unique treatment and an individual contract. This was called a “specialist” contract, and was generally just a crappy version of a consultant contract. It meant you...

Read 18 tweets

Niall Conroy

@NICU_doc_salone

21 Oct

The pandemic response in Ireland has understandably led to quite a bit of confusion and things are changing rapidly, from lockdowns to school closures. So I thought I’d write a thread on what might, and might not, work well in a country like Ireland with over 1000 cases per day..

..Recurring lockdowns don’t work. Well, it depends on what you mean by “work”. They’re v good at getting cases numbers low. But they don’t change any of the underlying conditions that allowed the virus to multiply in the first place. So, once society opens up, cases go up again..

..I’m slightly concerned that people are being fed a narrative that reads “if we do this lockdown right, we can stop this virus”. It may well get us low cases for Xmas, but I’d anticipate another lockdown around Easter, though I hope I’m wrong about that...

Read 31 tweets

Niall Conroy

@NICU_doc_salone

20 Jun

Five things I’ve done in the last year as a public health doctor that, like most of what we do, flies under the radar....

1) Our surveillance system found disease-causing mosquitoes in an area where they shouldn’t be. We developed a plan to eradicate them, which we did, and followed up with continued surveillance to make sure they were gone. Nobody became unwell.

2) Managed a pertussis (whooping cough) outbreak in a shelter for a vulnerable population with quite a few very young babies living there. After we implemented the outbreak management plan, nobody else became unwell.

Read 12 tweets

Niall Conroy

@NICU_doc_salone

7 Mar

In trying to make sense of what might seem like confusing or inconsistent decisions around #COVIDー19 interventions at the population level it might be helpful to look at the different phases of a pandemic and what type of control measures happen during each phase. This is....

....the Australian pandemic plan. It’s publicly available. Ireland will have a VERY similar plan, though the names of the phases might be different. PHASE 1: Preparedness; This is when planning happens. It’s ongoing, with meetings, desktop exercises and pressure testing.....

.....PHASE 2: Standby; This phase kicks in when there’s sustained transmission overseas. When China saw the situation get bad, most countries stepped into this phase. It’s enhanced level of preparation. Lots of banal work goes on behind the scenes, from making sure local plans...

Read 19 tweets

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