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Niall Conroy Profile picture
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8 Aug, 8 tweets, 2 min read
When reporting on Covid in Australia, the world’s media is keen to report on a perceived inability to control the virus as time goes on. But context is important. This is a country that’s the size of a continent….
Most cases are in New South Wales, with less than 25 cases being reported today outside that state.
A lot of people were chuffed to report that Brisbane went into lockdown last week. That ended today, with all cases in South East Queensland in recent days linked to other known cases. That’s a great result in the public health world, though we’re DEFINITELY not out of the woods
Sadly, while Brisbane exited lockdown, Cairns has to impose restrictions for three days because a taxi driver there tested positive for covid and worked several shifts while infectious. His source of infection is not clear….
…These are not failures. This is how you live a normal-ish life during a pandemic. Open up society by using border restrictions and every so often you get an outbreak and you suppress it like it’s ebola. Each time we endure the lockdown bit, it’s reported as failure. But the….
…re-openings get much less attention. I’m not saying it’s perfect. Closed borders are a nightmare and I’m running on fumes trying to make sure my patch stays covid free, while helping my colleagues in the cities. It feels like it’ll never end sometimes. But my wife and son….
….can pretty much do what they like during the day. There are virtually no restrictions where I live, because there doesn’t need to be (yet!). That’s why we need the lockdowns and the border stuff. They’re not a series of failures. They’re what we know and expect. It’s what…
…aggressive suppression looks like in practice. Righty or wrongly, this is what zero covid is.

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More from @NICU_doc_salone

Niall Conroy Profile picture
22 Jan
I’ve been delighted to see the sudden surge in support for mandatory hotel quarantine (MHQ) in Ireland, with the aim of achieving zero covid. While it is, on balance, the best option, I fear that some commentators have underestimated the challenges. Here are some examples....
...1) MHQ is frequently framed as a temporising measure, with the aim of establishing quarantine-free travel bubbles with other zero covid regions. Not many countries have achieved zero community transmission. But in those that have, travel bubbles have been vanishingly rare...
...2) MHQ is super strict. The point of it is that it would allow Ireland to open up society again. If you miss cases in that context, you let infectious people into a country where socialising is the norm. The result is explosive outbreaks. In countries that have MHQ, you...
Read 10 tweets
Niall Conroy Profile picture
20 Jan
Getting the whole world vaccinated against covid MUST be a priority. It’s unconscionable that close to zero people in low-income countries have been vaccinated so far. This is important to absolutely everybody for three reasons...
...1) The ethics of only vaccinating a quarter of the planet should be unthinkable to us. 2) For many reasons, we will have vulnerable people who are not protected by the vaccine, now and in the future. These people will be at risk on an ongoing basis from imported cases if...
...the virus continues to circulate globally. 3) The longer the virus thrives, the higher the chance of mutations, which could make any vaccine less effective or ineffective....
Read 11 tweets
Niall Conroy Profile picture
29 Nov 20
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....
.....This graph has since been used to estimate the ideal number of deaths in a population. Hat tip to @conorsmith .....
Read 8 tweets
Niall Conroy Profile picture
30 Oct 20
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..
....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 Profile picture
21 Oct 20
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 Profile picture
20 Jun 20
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

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