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The National Public Health Emergency Team has reported another 48 deaths from Covid-19 patients, 45 of which occurred in January.
This brings the total number of deaths in the pandemic to 3,214.
The average age of those who died is 82 years old and they were between 30 and 99 years old.
Nphet also reported 1,254 confirmed cases of the disease, bringing the total number of cases in the Republic to 193,892.
Of the new cases, 437 are in Dublin, 146 in Cork, 76 in Meath, 69 in Wexford and 62 in Kildare, and the remaining 464 cases are spread across all other counties.
The mean age of the cases is 42 years and 54% are under 45 years of age.
The 14-day incidence of the illness has dropped to 575 cases per 100,000 people nationwide. Monaghan has the highest incidence in the county, followed by Louth and Waterford. Leitrim has the lowest incidence.
The five-day moving average is 1,269 boxes per day.
On Friday afternoon, 1,518 Covid-19 patients were hospitalized, 49 fewer than the day before. This included 211 patients in the ICU, five fewer. There were 51 additional hospitalizations in the previous 24 hours.
Professor Anthony Staines
Meanwhile, public health specialist Professor Anthony Staines previously said that the government does not have a long-term strategy to address Covid-19, while the first four weeks of the year have been “wasted” fighting for it. ” zero-Covid “. among those calling for zero-Covid and said the government’s current approach to the virus will lead to “recurring shutdowns before vaccines go live.”
Professor Staines is Professor of Public Health Systems at Dublin City University (DCU) and a member of the Independent Scientific Advocacy Group (ISAG) which recommends a zero Covid strategy.
“We have wasted the first four weeks of this lockdown, we could have used that time to bring in resources, build and improve systems. Instead, we have used it fighting Covid Zero. We could have done it and up and running now, ”he told The Irish Times.
“The Government does not have a long-term strategy, it is to respond, respond, respond. The virus is in front of us all the time. I was talking about playing whack-a-ball with the virus in March of last year. We are still playing whack-a-ball with the virus and we are losing. “
Zero-Covid is the point at which Covid-19 has been reduced as close to zero as possible through strict control measures.
Professor Philip Nolan, chairman of Nphet’s epidemiological modeling advisory group, said Thursday that “it is a completely false promise to say that we can go to level 0 or 1 in the space of weeks or months.”
“That will not happen, and it would be an incredibly risky thing because we will inevitably be a leaky country and we will have the reintroduction of the disease, and that could easily be new variants,” he said.
Professor Nolan said he shared the goal of reducing community transmission of the virus to “as close as possible” to zero, stopping non-essential travel, and doing “all we can” through testing and isolation to limit the risk of reintroducing the infection. .
“But we have to accept in the circumstances of this country that no such system will be perfect and can guarantee the complete exclusion of any new disease or variant.”
Dr. Tony Holohan, chief medical officer, said zero-Covid would be very difficult to apply “realistically in an environment like ours.”
Ireland is a small economy dependent on its ties to Europe and “we just couldn’t realistically seal the borders of this country and prevent people from going in and out,” he said.
In response to Professor Nolan’s comments, Professor Staines said that “it is not a false hope.”
“The worst that could happen with Zero-Covid is that we try and fail. We would not be one iota worse off if we did and we could be better off because we could control cases within our community, ”he said.
“Even if we did it right and nothing else, we would not get our lives back to normal, but it would reduce the number of cases.”
Professor Staines said that Covid zero would not require “sealing the border,” but travel between the North and South would have to be limited.
“What you do for the border is manage it, the border communities can still go back and forth … you make arrangements for the aircrew, the sailors, the truck drivers,” he added.
“What is much more difficult, but sadly deeply necessary, is that people do not return home for funerals, for weddings. The difficult thing is the people who really have a good reason to return home and cannot. I’m not trying to minimize the burden on those people, it’s terrible, but this is a terrible infection. “
Professor Tomas Ryan, a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, said zero-Covid has never been “formally considered by the Government or Nphet.”
“There is no documentation that says yes, they simply reject it at press conferences and simply reject it at the Oireachtas. That is not formally considering what it would look like, ”he said.
Professor Ryan said that all the justifications given by Nphet for rejecting a zero Covid strategy were “non-medical and non-scientific reasons.”
“I thought it was strange, you had Professor Nolan and Dr. Holohan rejecting one strategy without offering another and more than that, rejecting a strategy based on economic reasons, based on political reasons,” he said.
Paul Reid, CEO of HSE has said that the debate on a Covid zero strategy was frustrating and attributed it to displaced anger.
Reid told Newstalk Breakfast that anger and frustration over the virus and restrictions were shifting “to something else” – it had focused on young people, meat plants, international travel, but ultimately it was about behavior.
“I don’t think it’s possible to block it [Covid] out, ”he said.
A full range of measures would be needed to suppress the virus, he added. “It is not about closing the island. I wish it were that simple. “
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