What has been a daily Covid marker for over two years has ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Am I depressed? Certainly not. It is, however, a watershed point in Northern Ireland’s Covid-19 saga.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Covid-19 daily dashboard statistics were published online by the Department of Health for more than two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That stopped on Friday, when the final post stated that “262 positive cases have been detected in the last 24 hours, with no deaths confirmed during that time.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, while data publication has halted, Covid has not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the last two years, my colleagues and I at the Northern Ireland health center have moved daily data to massive whiteboards that have dominated our time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By May 2022, we had depleted four big boards, each having numbers on both the back and front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every number represented a person, a man or a woman, each with their own narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Families initially told us that they did not want their loved ones to be remembered as a statistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Catherine Smyth, my coworker, and I took turns filling in the board; at first, the writing was tidy and orderly, but our patience wore thin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“This will probably last around three months,” one of us said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We often knew the person behind the number in the early days, but then the numbers increased and we couldn’t keep up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It became impossible to put days into weeks and months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What has been a daily Covid marker for over two years has ended. Am I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[591],"tags":[593],"class_list":["post-16977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-northern-ireland"],"yoast_head":"\n