A doctor who is working on the front line helping to treat those with coronavirus said it’s hard not to get emotionally tied up in it and she has cried following the deaths of people from the highly infectious disease.
Dr Cliona Ní Cheallaigh, who is a consultant in general medicine and infectious diseases at St James’s Hospital in Dublin, said: “It’s so hard for loved ones of people who have died.
"It’s hard to lose a loved one at the best of times and then they can’t maybe spend as much time as they want in the hospital with them as they normally would, the funeral, it’s all just so hard for families.
“We have all cried. I mean you are human and all of us, doctors, nurses, porters, catering staff, health care attendances, we all care for the people that we look after and like them, that’s why we do what we do.
“It is sad to see that people are dying.”
She added: “But I think the good thing in all this is how nice people are being to one another in all this. It’s what’s keeping us all together, that we are all in this together.
“I think the only thing that will really make a huge difference is a vaccine which we are working on very hard and it will come and is coming as quickly as it can.
"But until that happens it’s going to be very hard for life to go back to normal because it’s so infectious when people have it.
“I think we all think that we will all just wake up and it will have been a dream. Still on some levels it just doesn’t feel real.”
Dr Ní Cheallaigh, a mother of two boys, concluded: “The only weapon we have is staying apart and washing our hands.
“Stay isolated, don’t mix with other people. It means that we don’t get overwhelmed, it means that we have enough ventilators, we have enough beds, we have enough nurses to look after people in the way that we know how to.”
