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Professor Philip Nolan warned the country to prepare for “worrying numbers,” as more than 3,000 new cases are expected to be confirmed today.
The chair of the Nphet Epidemiological Modeling Advisory Group said the expected figure will contain some of the 9,000 delayed cases reported by Nphet yesterday.
He said Ireland is on “a very significant increase” and for the number of cases to decrease, the country must “fully enter into the spirit of the measures introduced by the government.”
Speaking on RTÉ Radio’s Saturday with Katie HannonProfessor Nolan said that up to 6,000 cases per day could be seen at the peak of this third wave, but, if the reproduction numbers are “substantially” below one, figures of less than 1,000 cases per day could be seen by the end. from January.
Nphet’s model did not project the number of cases the country is seeing at the beginning of the month. When asked if the modeling system should be revised, Professor Nolan said that “exponential growth is notoriously difficult to predict accurately.”
He added that it only requires a “marginal” change in the levels of social contact for the difference between 2,000 cases a day and 4,000.
“The bottom line here is that whether we face 2,000 cases a day or 4,000 cases a day, that’s too many,” he said.
“It is more than our health systems or monitoring systems can cope with and requires the kind of decisions the government has made in recent days for the complete suppression of the virus.”
When asked about the new strain of Covid-19 in the UK, which Dr Cillian De Gascun does not believe is responsible for the recent spike in numbers, Professor Nolan said it is “too early to be definitive” .
“It is too early to be completely definitive on the role of the new variant as we only have limited data. The important thing to keep in mind is that it is a threat, we know it is here in Ireland,” he said.
However, he said: “We saw an even more intense level of socialization during Christmas than we could have expected and that is what brings us to the very precarious position we are in now.”
Dr. Cillian De Gascun, Director of the UCD National Virus Reference Laboratory, said yesterday that a small number of samples were analyzed for the new variant between December 23 and 29.
Nine new cases of the new strain were detected. Of the 169 samples detected for this new strain to date, 16 have been confirmed, and therefore Dr. De Gascun said that he does not believe this new strain is responsible for the “recent significant and worrying increase” in cases of Covid-19.
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