Derry GP Dr Tom Black
The Executive is expected announce details later today about exams, school closures and legally enforceable ‘stay at home orders’ to curtail the Covid spread.
Dr Tom Black, chair of the NI British Medical Association, said he and his colleagues have been calling for tougher restrictions to be imposed “for months”, with members reporting the situation on hospital wards has been deteriorating rapidly.
“We know from the transmission of the infection that it was going to get worse – we’ve been saying for about three months now, ‘too little, too late’,” Dr Black told the BBC.
“We knew that January was going to be the worst part of the pandemic.
“We knew we had to prepare for it and we knew we had to bring in timely lockdowns – and we failed at every point.”
On Monday, the Department of Health announced a further 12 deaths and 1,801 new cases of Coronavirus in the previous 24 hours.
“The Executive has a huge responsibility here for the levels of transmission that we have in Northern Ireland at the moment, and who suffers? The public.
“And the health service is expected to step up and sort it out again.
“The pressures on the healthcare service are such that health workers are suffering physical and psychological distress, and also from Covid infections themselves, isolations.
“So the pressures are unprecedented.”
On Monday, the Department of Health said that bed occupancy across all hospitals in the North was now at 99 per cent.
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