Post-Covid world ‘will be different’
GUERNSEY is unlikely to go back to exactly as it was before Covid, director of public health Dr Nicola Brink has said.
Islanders currently have to fill in travel trackers when arriving in the island, carry vaccine certificates for travel and are strongly advised to wear masks in poorly ventilated indoor areas.
Dr Nicola Brink said they were regularly reviewing the rules and advice.
‘In the post-Covid world, do I think things will go back to completely where we were?’ she said.
‘No. Because I think we’re going to have a heightened awareness of how pandemics emerge and how we can prevent getting ourselves into such a situation again. So I think there is going to be a focus globally on pandemic management and pandemic prevention.’
Locally, she said public health would monitor how things developed over Christmas, and would remove restrictions as soon as they safely could.
CCA adviser Deputy Heidi Soulsby said she did not think the rules would be relaxed before Christmas.
‘We need to see over the hump of the celebratory period and the time when we would expect to have more respiratory diseases coming on and the flu,’ she said.
‘It’s all about seeing what will happen in the hospital over that period.’
Dr Brink said Guernsey’s highly vaccinated population meant a change to how much risk there was to the island from Covid, compared with the start of the pandemic. She highlighted that 17 islanders died with Covid during the first wave of infection.
But since then, despite dealing with a more transmissible variant of the virus, there had not been such an impact on the hospital or mortality.
‘We are in a different situation now, with a highly vaccinated population,’ she said.
Deputy Soulsby said this had been the aiming of the exit from lockdown plans.
‘It’s about looking and living under a new normal,’ she said.
Mask wearing has been a controversial issue. Deputy Soulsby said no one was expecting people to be perfect about wearing masks all the time, but the more they were worn, the lower the risks would be.
One factor in the consideration of restrictions and mask-wearing rules has been how the hospital was coping.
Medical director Dr Peter Rabey said that while the hospital was busy, there were only four patients with Covid and the hospital was able to cope with more Covid patients.
He added that if agency staff could be brought in, all wards could be opened over the winter to get more capacity.
