Dr Gerry Killeen: Just like measles, elimination of Covid is still feasible in Ireland

Elimination doesn't mean global reduction to zero, it means elimination from an area, where there is no locally sustained human-to-human transmission, writes Dr Gerry Killeen

If we want to stop the emergence of new variants, we need to look after our most vulnerable, and the only way to do that over the long term is to eliminate transmission one country, region, and continent at a time.

Britain's chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, justified his country’s plan to comprehensively unravel restrictions intended to suppress Covid transmission on July 19 by saying: “At a certain point, you move to the situation where instead of actually averting hospitalisations and deaths, you move over to just delaying them. So you’re not actually changing the number of people who will go to hospital or die, you may change when they happen.”

Prof. Whitty has been consistent in his view that elimination of Covid is “not realistic”, insisting that we must accept and learn to live with Covid as an endemic pathogen. More strident advocates for herd immunity in the UK have gone further, making dangerously misleading comparisons with influenza, while also disregarding the impact of long Covid on at least a million people in the UK.