Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

The one huge difference between Ireland and most of the USA is the prevalence, and necessity, of air conditioning. A lot of offices, buildings, classrooms etc in the US will have air conditioners running all the time and there's a serious confusion between fresh air and chilled air.

In winter in many parts of the USA it will also be impossible to open windows as it's going to be far, far too cold. If you open a window on a cold winter's day in the midwest somewhere, or even the North East, it's not just a bit draughty, it's uncomfortable and even dangerously cold.

There's a lot more risk of closed rooms with recirculating air in the US than here. Most of those systems have no filtration capability at all, other than maybe dust filters to protect their own components. So if there's virus in the air, it will be chilled and recirculated, and more and more of it just accumulates. That seems to be what was happening with the meat plant outbreaks here for example.

I think in an Irish context, we should be lashing a lot more money into providing suitable HEPA filters for classrooms, and also ensuring that they have adequate ventilation - there are things like heat-exchange vents that can be used, even if they're put through windows.

We need to be looking at things like the use of extractor fans, much like they had in old pubs in the days of smokey rooms. Increase the number of air changes in restaurants, bars etc ... Make sure you don't have stale air in places like toilets etc.

Simple things like lifts can be programmed to always park with the door open to keep them ventilated, rather than always closing.

The reality of this situation is this virus isn't going to just disappear in a few more months. We could be living with this for a long time to come and we do need to learn to live with it and not just keep assuming it's a finite problem that will end anytime soon.

We're stuck with it and we need to start adapting buildings to cope with it and that means applying technology and stop burying our heads in the sand. It's not that big a deal to plug in say 3 decent sized HEPA filters in every classroom. They'll become as much part of the background as the radiators are.

We are moving far too slowly on this and the Department of Education in particular seems to be engaging in what looks almost like 'magical thinking' if it imagines that somehow it can be dealt with by just mopping surfaces having little perspex shields.

The use of antigen testing has to become a routine issue here too as a tool for avoiding clusters.

We can either spend money on practical solutions to make things possible, or we can spend many, many times more money supporting businesses if there's some need for another lockdown. I'd rather go with the practical solutions and get things back to normal ASAP.

There just seems to be a lot of measures like improving ventilation and filtration of air that could be achieved, without any negative impact on lifestyles - in fact they might even make a lot of spaces more pleasant. However, we're not doing them on a serious scale or in any kind of coordinated way, because they're not as tangible and visible as the physical surface hygiene measures.

I'd like to see businesses making a feature of "this restaurant uses HEPA filtration, and monitors air changes to provide you with a safe, comfortable and pleasant dining experience" It's something that could be a major selling point, not an imposition.

I never understand the logic of how hospitals are designed here. New build hospitals should be aiming to have individual wards and easy infection control. The days of building huge multi-bed wards should have been long over.

It always struck me as a marketing gimmick here in the sense that it was needed to sell tiers of insurance. The higher up the insurance ratings you the more likely you will have a private room. So there's a notion that private room in a public hospital is an oxymoron.

I also never quite understood why hospital wards don't have phenomenally good ventilation. I remember when my own mom sadly passed away with a sudden stroke, she was in a neurological ward for 24 hours and there was a patient who had to use a bed pan and to be quite honest the smell would make you nearly throw up. The only ventilation seemed to be normal windows open at the top, and the ward was just heated by radiators.

You'd expect an advanced air handling system that would safely remove 100% of the air in ward areas, passing it through a heat exchanger to save energy, but replace it all with fresh air.

We seem to still design hospital wards as if they're just any other space. They're nothing special in terms of infrastructure beyond wipe down surfaces.

Hospitals should be designed to control infection. That should quite literally be the core underlying philosophy of everything about their design. We seem to get bogged down on the same design criteria that you'd expect for a hotel room or an office building instead.

I mean, if you think about it, we're facing into a reality where there could be further pandemics and airborne pathogens like this one, there already are and will undoubtedly be more antibiotics resistant bacterial infections like MSRA and strains of Clostridioides difficile etc etc, yet I see little evidence that we've been planning infrastructure to deal with it.

Things like Norovirus (winter vomiting bug) or influenza outbreaks in hospitals simply shouldn't be an issue either and they'd be much less of one if the damn places were designed and managed correctly.

How many tens of millions get spent treating, delaying discharges and resulting in clogs and backlogs which have social and financial costs, all because of hospital infections that probably wouldn't have occurred if proper measures were in place around design and management?

It's amazing that hospitals, for probably the first time ever, are beginning to realise for example that they don't need to keep bringing everyone in for pointless reasons or stack them in waiting rooms for hours and hours because everyone's been given the same clinic time and so on. Finally some very basic elements of queue management are being applied! It only took a century and a pandemic for the penny to drop.

There's a lot we should be learning from, analysing and changing because of the experience with COVID. It should be an opportunity to reform and fix a lot of the health system. However, I'm sure it will be wasted as that's exactly what we always do.

which in your view means “keeping your distance”. That, at this stage, is a disproportionate response to the risk that remains

What hospital crisis? 262 in the entire country?

How many are actually in there only due to Covid?