Coronavirus: Solution to hospitality crisis? Send sick people to live in hotel suites says Queen’s professor

Professor Ultan Power made the suggestion at a time of mass layoffs for pub, restaurant and hotel workers around the Province due to the collapse of trade.

He also said he stands by his earlier estimate for the number of Northern Irish infections, which is very much lower than the worst-case scenario painted by health minister Robin Swann.

Prof Power said: “One of the big things the South Koreans did is that they isolated people who were positive away from their homes.

“They provided special accommodation for them. Hotels are probably not so busy now.

“So would it be an idea to recycle the use as a possible way of isolating people who are positive, and their contact tracings?

“That’d be a win-win for everybody.”

South Korea was once close to the top of the international list of infected countries, but has now fallen to eighth place, below Iran, several European countries, and the US.

“The rooms are not being used, people can be isolated there away from their families, because the biggest transmission happens in the home,” said Prof Power.

“I guess the hotels could negotiate some deal with the government., and could provide meals to look after folk who are positive - assuming they’re not so sick they need to be hospitalised.

“Most of the people are relatively mild anyway, but what we need to do is isolate them so they don’t transmit to other people.”

Prof Power, who works at the medicine and biomed department of Queen’s University Belfast (which has now moved to shut down completely due to coronavirus fears) told the News Letter a week ago, just before the authorities tightened up their advice to the public, that if things had continued as they were Northern Ireland could expect perhaps 11,000 Covid-19 cases.

About 2,500 of those would be severe, and about 400 would die.

These were radically different figures from the ones suggested by a Queen’s colleague, Dr Connor Bamford, who indicated it was reasonable to believe infections could hit 900,000, with perhaps 9,000 of those dying in Northern Ireland.

On Thursday, health minister Robin Swann said a reasonable worst case scenario is that about 15,200 people in Northern Ireland could die.

Prof Power said he was “not going to criticise him for those figures - they are theoretically possible”.

But he said his own modelling is based on the “attack rate” of the virus in Wuhan before the Chinese government cracked down (that is, the number of people a carrier would go on to affect), whereas he believed the Department of Health was using a different model (the one devised by Imperial College London, which envisaged perhaps 250,000 deaths in the UK).

Prof Power “does not think it’s going to be as drastic as that”, because people will heed the government advice to stop circulating, and that will suppress the rate.