One of the country's top Intensive Care doctors has said she does not want to see thousands of people returning to work in crowded offices in the years to come - because the Covid-19 pandemic has proven so many of them could work safely and comfortably from home.
Dr Catherine Motherway, who is past president of the Intensive Care Society, and head of the ICU at the Mid Western University Regional hospital in Limerick, said the country has seen thousands of people confined to their own homes because of the spread of the virus and they had shown they could very well adapt to working there - where the threat of infection was so much lower.
In an interview with RTÉ News, Dr Motherway said there were days when she cried in the ICU as the full effect of the pandemic hit.
However, she said she and her colleagues were "used to death" such is the nature of ICU work so they did what they always do - get on with the hugely important work of trying to make people better and comforting relatives often in the most difficult of circumstances.
"We were using telephones, texts, Whats App messages to relay the latest news and that's all we could do to keep loves ones up to date," Dr Motherway said.
The ICU doctor also said that relatives were faced with the most difficult of circumstances when they lost a family member because they could not be with their loved one; but everyone had to try and help and support them.
In a candid interview, Dr Motherway spoke of the trauma experienced by relatives and families of some of the people who were most ill in the pandemic.
"We were told by our colleagues abroad what was coming and what we should prepare for," she said, "and we did our best to ensure we were ready to act. If there is a silver lining from any of this, it's the fact that we now have more ICU beds and the promise of even more to come in the mid west."
Looking forward to the vaccination of thousands of people in 2021, Catherine Motherway said she hoped the vaccine would save lives and she said the real long-lasting effect of Covid would probably not be known for years to come, because much more research would have to be done to get a true picture.
