WATCH: NHS Highland director on Covid lockdowns: ‘People did the best they could’
NHS Highland’s director of public health has spoken about how the health service - and the public - is “still feeling the effects” of Covid five years after the first lockdowns were imposed.
Restricting people’ s movements and access to services in a whole range of areas Dr Tim Allison said the “knock-on” effects of that were significant - “either because people were due to have operations or other investigations or procedures and they weren’t able to have them (or) there was an effect of people not coming forward for diagnosis or treatment as early as they’d normally do, because of the restrictions or feeling that other things were going on, whether in their lives or around in the community and in the health service.”
He said: “That meant conditions would have been more serious when people actually came to seek help.”
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He believes that in terms of how the public reacted to lockdown restrictions “people generally did the best that they could using the information available.”
“A lot of people in the NHS went above and beyond what would normally be expected in their work, but a lot of other people did as well - and there were a lot of groups of people who suffered quite a lot, but perhaps we don’t remember that now,” he said.
Pointing out that the death rate for taxi drivers, as one example, was particularly high he also said the situation in some care homes - where a Covid outbreak could see significant numbers of residents dying within a short space of time - was “really traumatic” for all involved.
The development of the first vaccines against Covid within a year of lockdown he called an “absolutely remarkable” achievement and talked down fears about a growth in “anti-vax” sentiment in the wake of the pandemic, pointing out that “there is no treatment at all that doesn’t come with downsides” and “there was an anti-vax movement in the 18th century - so it’s nothing new”.
In terms of how things might go if and when the next pandemic hits he said: “I think we are probaly better equipped than we were pre-Covid because of coming across Covid.
“Plans have tended to focus particularly on influenza because that’s bee seen as the biggest risk and there will be another flu pandemic, and there could be something else so we need to have that variety of preparation.”
