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The number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in recent days is underestimated by an estimated 4,000, due to delays in registering positive results in the system over the Christmas period, a senior health official said.
Professor Philip Nolan, chair of Nphet’s Irish Epidemiological Modeling Advisory Group, said that the epidemiological situation has deteriorated rapidly over the past week and that we are “clearly in the middle of the third wave.”
He said the number of breeders is at least 1.6 to 1.8, and the daily growth rate is estimated at 7 to 10 percent, giving a doubling time of seven to 10 days or less.
There were 1,620 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the Republic reported on Thursday.
Questions and answers: everything you need to know about the third lock
However, Professor Nolan said the actual number of positive cases is higher than has been reported, due to a delay between a test that comes back positive and is reported in the system.
He said that this situation arose because “very few people” showed up for the tests on Christmas Eve, Christmas and San Esteban. However, immediately after Christmas, there was a large number of tests, which created an “artificial wave” of tests.
“We know of additional positive tests that have not yet been reported in the system in the last few days. On December 28 there were 2,000 positive tests and on December 29 there were almost 3,000. Yesterday, December 30, 4,363 positive tests were registered, “he told Nphet’s briefing on Thursday night.
“Those positive Covid tests are not necessarily cases. Those positive tests must be validated. . . but many of them will become cases. We estimate that there are around 4,000 positive cases in the last two to three days that have yet to be formally confirmed. They will be confirmed in the coming days ”.
Professor Nolan said this lag “in no way interferes” with case identification, but acknowledged that the epidemiological situation is “somewhat worse” than has been reported.
“This system was not designed to report 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 tests per day. We expect to see very high case counts and very high five-day moving averages over the next 10-day week, ”he added.
Contacts
Meanwhile, Medical Director Dr. Tony Holohan has announced that close contacts of a confirmed case will no longer be tested due to increased demand on the testing and tracing service.
Close contacts will continue to be identified and asked to restrict their movements for 14 days.
“It’s just about scale and volume. We are now at a point where it is simply not possible for us to identify each contact and test each contact the way we were doing at lower levels of transmission, ”he said.
“It is enough to take the numbers we have, if we were identifying three, four, thousand cases through positive tests per day and each of them is now generating an average of 6.3 contacts. That’s more than 20,000 tests per day that are generated as a result of test contacts. “
Dr. Holohan acknowledged that these changes make the accuracy of the confirmed daily figures “challenging.”
However, he said they believe it is important to focus testability on individuals who are symptomatic, rather than contacts.
“We are effectively asking the entire population to isolate itself.”
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