Ireland has not learned lessons from the Covid pandemic in the absence of a public inquiry, leading to confusion over excess death figures, a public health expert has said.
Professor Anthony Staines said Ireland needs to “learn from what went right and what went wrong with Covid. So whenever this happens again, I hope it won’t be for many, many years, but whenever it happens again, we need to have a national response in place.”
Prof Staines was responding to a call from Aontú Leader Peadar Tóibín to the Minister for Health to urgently convene an independent inquiry into the cause of excess deaths in the State, after it was revealed to him that the number of excess deaths for each month in the last year were higher than the average number of deaths during the three years prior to Covid-19.
Mr Tóibín said: “I have been raising concerns about excess deaths for a prolonged period with the Government arising from concerns conveyed to me by the general public, and now I have been informed following a Parliamentary Question that in June of this year, it is estimated that Ireland experienced 13.6% additional deaths and has experienced additional deaths every month for the past 12 months.”
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There had been two European sources of data, Prof Staines told Newstalk Breakfast, and they were telling different stories. The issue was different ways of measuring data and it is not acceptable that “we don’t know what is going on.”
Prof Staines said there was still a lot of Covid in circulation which was resulting “in relatively small numbers of deaths because we have vaccines. The vaccines are making an extraordinary difference.”
But at the same time there was a health service which is “bursting at the seams.”
“So I think there’s reason to believe there might be a small number of excess deaths, but I really don’t know, I don’t have a crystal ball on this. And I guess we should know, we shouldn’t be having this discussion. We should be able to say it’s death. And that’s the end of the story”