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Chief Health Services Executive (HSE) Paul Reid has said 19,500 tests for Covid-19 were conducted on Thursday at a new daily record.
Reid told Newstalk Breakfast that last week’s numbers had been shocking, adding that the public needed to take a look at those numbers and act appropriately.
The figures are given when the HSE has a capacity for 100,000 tests per week, with an additional “surge” capacity in a German laboratory.
“If someone is looking at the trends and numbers that are coming in right now, it’s pretty serious,” Reid said.
“That is the volume we are at, the trend we are seeing and that is the concern: people must now take a radical look at everything we are doing. I mean it.”
The positivity rate for tests done in the past seven days is now over 4 percent.
ICU capacity
Mr. Reid urged the public not to meet people they did not need to meet and to avoid having others visit their homes for the next several weeks.
No matter whether the government or Nphet did it, the biggest impact on the numbers would be public behavior, “what people do,” he said.
“We are all on the same page that our hospital service is being challenged, and we watch it very closely every day, and we want all other services to continue to function.”
There was no disagreement between the health service and Nphet, he said. Everyone was equally concerned about the impact of a total shutdown.
Mr. Reid said there are currently about 41 fully staffed ICU beds available in the health care system.
While there was capacity to expand if needed, that would mean stopping some other health services, he added.
“We don’t want to get anywhere near those levels,” he said.
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