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The coronavirus is spreading through people’s homes when visitors press the doorbell, use towels and share cutlery, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar warned.
Explaining why it was necessary to ban home visits across the country, Varadkar said there was a fundamental difference in the Covid behavior of people in home settings.
“At home people don’t [taking safety precautions] so much. Some people think it is student house parties. . . there’s a bit of that, but actually what’s happening in much larger volumes is the family dinner on the weekend, it’s the few friends who come for a drink, ”he said, including the children’s play dates in the mix. of scenarios responsible for possible hazards, otherwise. normal social interactions.
“People are getting too close, they are staying together for too long,” he said. “They are transmitting the virus by pressing the doorbell, by sharing a spoon, by using the bathroom and leaving it on a towel. All of those things have spread disease and that is why we have had to do this. “
The Tánaiste explained the latest series of social restrictions put into play by the government on Wednesday in an attempt to curb the growing number of cases, which exceeded 1,200 on Thursday.
“The idea is that the outdoors is better than the indoors and when it is in a controlled public environment people are much more likely to stay apart, sit at the table and sit at separate tables. Whereas when there are five or six people in a room, it is different. ”
In an interview with Matt Cooper on Today FM, he admitted that far from accepting dynamic and continuous controls in their lives, people can begin to resent them as the pandemic continues into the later stages of the year.
“Of course there is a danger of that. It was very different in the spring when this was all new and we were asking people to do this for the first time and it was clearly working. Asking people to do it a second time is very difficult and the numbers keep increasing. ”
However, he said the recent reintroduction of the Garda checkpoints would serve to remind people of the seriousness of the public health situation at a time when traffic levels suggest people are still going to work.
He said he hoped Level 4 measures in border counties would be enough to curb the disease, and said restrictions in Ireland are now among the strictest in Europe.
In the wake of the budget and his expanding health spending, Varadkar said a massive increase in intensive care (ICU) beds was not necessarily the answer it might seem. He noted that the death rate from Covid-19 for those who end up in intensive care is between 20 and 40 percent.
“The solution is not to have 1,000 ICU beds full of Covid patients … the solution is to reduce the number of people who get sick and require ICU in the first place.”
Meanwhile, fines will be levied on the spot in the coming weeks for those who violate mask regulations, rather than taking offenders to court, he said.
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