Above: Coronavirus under a microscope

11th January 2020

This is an email from an outlying hospital to one of the major Belfast Hospitals asking for transfer of a seriously ill patient:

“I know you are probably under extreme pressures as with ourselves at the minute”.

Nothing new here you might think, except the date of this email was Jan 21st 2020, months before the pandemic began.

The pandemic has exposed the chronic lack of critical care beds in the province which has been one of the main factors in determining the imposition of “lock-downs”,  giving rise to the mantra “Save our NHS”. Northern Ireland has one of the fewest Critical Care beds per head of population, only about 6 and the UK 7 per 100,000 compared with Germany (29) and the USA (35) according to Forbes.

We have been peculiarly ill equipped to cope with a pandemic such as this and some of the responsibility must lie with the “Public Health” doctors who have been constantly and almost piously lecturing us in the media about the need for more lockdowns.