Clean Air
While the media has moved on from reporting on the Covid pandemic, unfortunately the virus never went away and the consequences of not mitigating against the transmission of an airborne virus has placed extra stress on an already strained healthcare system. Staff shortages in healthcare due to a hiring freeze, illness, burnout, emigration and long covid are now creating extra delays in an already overstretched system. Increased illness and chronic illness throughout the population is putting extra demands on the health service and too many people with unavoidable conditions are experiencing terrible delays in their treatment.
We are now five years into the Covid pandemic, and we have the benefit of four years of scientific research on SARS CoV2 available to us. I am concerned that the HSE has abandoned its Public Health remit as we knew it, in favour of superficial PR communications to normalise repeat covid infections. I would like to take this opportunity to provide some links here in the footnotes to the research that has emerged, which demonstrates that:
Covid is airborne, it spreads in the air like smoke[1] and while handwashing is always good, wearing an N95/FFP3 respirator mask is the best way to avoid getting or spreading infection[2].
Covid infection is a Multi-Systemic Disease and infects almost all organs in the body which can lead to inflammation throughout the body and cause a whole range of health problems including heart[3], lung and brain[4] issues. Reinfections raise the risk of developing health problems later on[5].
Most importantly, children are not immune[6] and too many children are already suffering consequences of previous covid infection/s and recovery from Long Covid remains rare[7].
I believe that all children should have free and safe access to education. All children have a constitutional right to free primary education, including children with health vulnerabilities. It is a failure of public health and a failure to protect the rights and health of all children, that during the fifth year of a global pandemic[8] and in the midst of a rise in the incidence of respiratory illnesses and airborne pathogens, the majority of classrooms around the country remain unventilated.
If elected councillor, I will pursue enforcement of the right to clean air afforded to workers by The Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations 2007, as amended by S.I.255 of 2023[9], starting with all schools, childcare, healthcare, public transport settings and Galway County Council operated public buildings throughout the County. This would have a major benefit to students’ concentration and learning progress due to students and teachers having to take fewer sick days. It would also have a major benefit on the wider community as it has been found that 70% of household infection starts with a school going child[10]. Many children have been disabled by prior Covid infections and face a challenging recovery. By allowing Covid and other airborne pathogens to circulate in classrooms without any mitigations, these children are excluded from accessing the free education they are entitled to as they cannot risk further infection. More children will end up disabled by Covid with repeat infections.
For a list of resources on Covid’s impact on the immune system, please follow the link to the Yale School of Public Health’s list of resources on this topic[11]:
I want Galway County Council to provide free N95/FFP3 respirator masks to children and adults accessing education and healthcare who request them. It is unfair that individuals who wish to protect themselves and their loved ones from airborne infection during an ongoing pandemic are forced to pay for public health failures out of pocket. I also believe that respirators should be mandatory in healthcare, especially in the absence of adequate air filtration and ventilation. People accessing healthcare should not be infected by easily preventable airborne pathogens leaving them worse off and causing avoidable backlogs in discharging patients. I want to see HEPA filtration and ventilation installed.
[1] Kimberly A. Prather et al. ,Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.Science370,303-304(2020).DOI:10.1126/science.abf0521 Available at: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf0521
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/masks-work-distorting-science-to-dispute-the-evidence-doesnt/
[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/covid-19-risk-heart-attack-stroke
[4] Douaud, G., Lee, S., Alfaro-Almagro, F. et al. SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK Biobank. Nature 604, 697–707 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04569-5
[5] Bowe B, Xie Y, Al-Aly Z. Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection. Nat Med. 2022 Nov;28(11):2398-2405. doi: 10.1038/s41591-022-02051-3. Epub 2022 Nov 10. PMID: 36357676; PMCID: PMC9671810. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36357676/ ; See also https://time.com/6553340/covid-19-reinfection-risk/
[6] Pinto Pereira SM, Mensah A, Nugawela MD, Stephenson T, Ladhani SN, Dalrymple E, Dudley J, McOwat K, Simmons R, Heyman I, Segal T, Semple MG, Xu L; CLoCk Consortium; Shafran R. Long COVID in Children and Young after Infection or Reinfection with the Omicron Variant: A Prospective Observational Study. J Pediatr. 2023 Aug;259:113463. doi: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2023.113463. Epub 2023 May 11. PMID: 37172813; PMCID: PMC10171900. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10171900/
[7] https://time.com/6309054/long-covid-recovery-rare/
[8] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rampant-covid-poses-new-challenges-in-the-fifth-year-of-the-pandemic/
[9] https://www.hsa.ie/eng/topics/ventilation/
[10] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2805468
[11] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ofgXOn0WkTX1w1cwpacIXxK8RFL047yoDxXcqMHOtkE/edit https://www.instagram.com/p/C58hBW9LC3j/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==