Archive for Covid-19

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Coronavirus Contingency

Posted in Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , on March 9, 2020 by telescoper

Today we heard that the annual St Patrick’s Day Parades due to take place around Ireland next week on 17th March have been cancelled. Although it seems the Government was reluctant to take this decision, it seems to me an entirely sensible precaution.

I also noticed an article this weekend that academic staff at a St Mary Immaculate College in Limerick have been asked to draw up “…contingency plans for delivering module content in the event of there being on-campus restrictions due to the coronavirus.”

I’d be very surprised if there is an educational institute that has not asked staff to undertake contingency planning of this sort. It would indeed be irresponsible to fail to plan for such an eventuality. The fact that such processes are going on is no reason at all for students or staff to feel anxious.

All Heads of Department here at Maynooth (including myself) have been briefed about the University’s contingency planning and have in turn briefed their staff. In general this planning, which is led by the official advice from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), seems sensible and proportionate. It also seems very similar to what is going on in Limerick.

For the time being here in Maynooth teaching carries on as normal, but if the situation deteriorates and the advice from HSE changes then contingency arrangements will be adopted. That may include restricting student access to campus and delivering some teaching online instead of in person. That won’t be ideal but it could be managed and we’ll do it circumstances require it.

We have a Study Week break for the week including St Patrick’s Day so after this Friday students won’t be on campus in large numbers anyway. That gives us a bit of time to assess developments.

In the meantime I’ll just share the official poster again.

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The Spread of the Coronavirus

Posted in Covid-19, Uncategorized with tags , on March 7, 2020 by telescoper

I thought I would share the above graphic because provides a simple yet very effective illustration of why
it is so important to delay the spread of the Coronavirus, and why strict precautions are being taken to achive that.

The primary cause of death for patients suffering from COVID-19, the disease carried by this virus is that inflamation of the lining of the alveoli in the lungs makes it harder for oxygen to diffuse across into the capillaries and for carbon dioxide to diffuse out. As outlined in the report I shared a few days ago, severe cases therefore require treatment that involves being supplied with oxygen via a respirator for a long period, perhaps weeks. The number of available respirators and intensive care units generally is likely to prove the factor that limits the capacity of hospitals to cope.

The situation might be worse in England because the NHS only has about 2.3 hospital beds per thousand of the population so the capacity limit may be hit much earlier. For reference, Ireland is not much better on 2.96, Scotland has 4.2 and Germany has 8; see here for OECD figures from other countries.

Delaying the spread of the virus may prevent health services from being overwhelmed by spreading out the peak in the manner indicated in the diagram even if the total number of cases were not to reduce. Pushing back the bulk of the distribution by weeks or months may also help if the virus is seasonal – it may transmit infection less efficiently during the spring or summer than it does during the winter.

In the light of this it can’t do any harm to share the HSE advice for Ireland again.

Now wash your hands please.

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The WHO-China Report on Corvid-19

Posted in Covid-19, Uncategorized with tags , , on March 4, 2020 by telescoper

As it is a matter of topical and general interest I thought it would be worthwhile sharing the joint World Health Organization – China report on Coronavirus, which you can find here. There is also a discussion thread on Reddit here.

A key figure from this report shows that the number of new cases of Covid-19 has indeed been declining:

The report indicates why and how this has happened. For example, when a cluster of several infected people occurred in China, it was most often (78-85%) caused by an infection within the family transmitted by droplets and other carriers of infection in close contact with an infected person. Transmission by fine aerosols in the air over long distances is not one of the main causes of transmission.

Do read the report. While not being complacent about the scale of the public health challenge, it is a valuable antidote to some of the scaremongering going on.

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Coronavirus Reactions

Posted in Covid-19, Maynooth with tags , , on March 2, 2020 by telescoper

I was having lunch last week when a colleague from another department here stated that he thought that within two weeks that he thought that within a fortnight Maynooth University would be closed down owing to the threat from Covid-19 (the Coronavirus). I’m not sure whether he meant it seriously. At the time I thought that was extremely improbable but this morning we heard that a school in the Dublin area has been closed for two weeks because one of its students has the virus, and now I’m not so sure…

Incidentally, setting aside possible the rights or wrongs decision to close the Dublin school the attempt by the Health Service Executive to keep its name from the public strikes me as utterly daft. Do they seriously think that none of the hundreds of pupils or parents thereof is going to talk about it? I checked on social media this morning and easily found its name. It won’t give people much confidence in the HSE to see them losing sight of reality.

Another reaction to this worldwide health scare became apparent yesterday as the American Physical Society cancelled at very short notice its meeting in Denver due to take place this week. Thousands of delegates were due to attend, and many of them had already arrived when the cancellation announcement was made.

I’m bound to say that I find all this to be quite an overreaction to the threat from Covid-19, but I am not an epidemiologist and I suppose the medical people must know what they are doing. It seems the primary objective at present is to limit the spread of the disease, which makes sense particularly as there is as yet to vaccine. Whether measures like those mentioned above will actually achieve that I don’t know. One has to balance that consideration against the risk of causing panic by giving the impression that things are out of control.

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens over the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, as part of my public service responsibility here is the official advert from the Irish Government:

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