The COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland: An overview of the health service and economic policy response

Objectives: To outline the situation in Ireland with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Analyse the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland. Review the key public health and health system responses. Results: Over 1700 people have died with COVID-19 by July 19th while almost 3000 people had been admitted to hospital with COVID-19. A high proportion of the deaths occurred in nursing homes and other residential centres who did not receive sufficient attention during the early phase of the pandemic. Conclusions: Ireland's response to the COVID-19 crisis has been comprehensive and timely. Transparency, a commitment to a relatively open data policy, the use of traditional and social media to inform the population, and the frequency of updates from the Department of Health and the Health Services Execu-tive are all commendable and have led to a high level of compliance among the general public with the various non-medical measures introduced by the government. (c) 2020 Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)