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Irish officials have blamed Christmas revelers for rising rates of Covid-19 infections.
They said the festive gatherings, rather than the more infectious new Covid variant spreading from the UK, were the main reason behind the escalation in the presence of the virus.
Ireland, which previously had one of the lowest infection rates in the entire European Union, now faces one of the fastest rates of deterioration, according to the country’s health chiefs.
Philip Nolan, head of Ireland’s Covid-19 modeling group, said over the weekend that he believed the new variant accounted for between 5 and 17 percent of the current prevalence.
“Right now we think the UK variant is here at a relatively low level, even with that small sample,” Nolan told national broadcaster RTE. “We saw an even more intense level of socialization and viral transmission over Christmas than we could have expected and that is what is leading us to the really precarious position that we are in now.”
Nolan spoke after Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin said last week that the new variant discovered in neighboring Britain was spreading in Ireland at a rate that has outpaced the more pessimistic models available to the government.
Ireland’s top virologist Cillian De Gascun revealed on Friday that labs had found 16 cases of the variant out of a sample of 169 positive cases.
Nolan said Ireland was going to report more than 3,000 cases a day over the weekend Saturday, almost double its daily record. He predicted a spike of up to 6,000 cases per day, due in part to a backlog of positive test results.
Infections are also spreading rapidly across the open border from British-led Northern Ireland. Cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days rose to 577 after the health authority reported another 3,576 cases in the last 48 hours.
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