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There are higher levels of Covid-19 circulating in the community than recent case numbers reflect, the country’s medical director said.
Dr. Tony Holohan said he expects a big increase in the number of cases in the coming days, due to the lower volume of tests that are done during Christmas.
It comes when 744 new cases of the disease were confirmed last night, along with four more deaths. On Saturday, 1,296 new cases were registered in the Republic, the largest daily increase since the pandemic began in March.
“Due to the lower volume of testing that took place on Christmas Day and yesterday, we believe there are higher levels of disease circulating in the community than reflected by the case numbers reported today,” said Dr. Holohan.
“We therefore expect to see a large increase in reported cases in the coming days.”
We don’t know where the infections come from.
It comes as DCU’s Professor Anthony Staines said that the Republic’s pandemic response has two “glaring holes” regarding importation of the virus from travel and contact tracing.
“We have not responded to the treatment of the importation of the virus from abroad, so we do not have any quarantine or isolation system in place at airports and ports,” he said.
“And the other has been that we haven’t really invested the resources in what I would consider professional quality contact tracing.
“We still don’t know why most people who get infected get infected. We don’t know where the infections come from. “
Next days
Professor Staines said that the R number, which indicates the average number of people likely to be infected by a confirmed case, cannot be allowed to rise any further.
“We would like it to be less than 1, because that would suggest that infection rates are going down,” he said.
“It was going up really fast and now it’s slowed down. Hopefully that’s not related to the reporting delays over Christmas, but we’ll find out in the next few days where we stand. And the fear in the Republic is certainly that if we continue to receive this number of cases, our hospital systems will fill up ”.
Dr. Holohan warned of the “significant increase” in the number of hospital admissions due to Covid-19 in recent weeks, and the number of people admitted to hospital with the virus rose from less than 190 two weeks ago to 324 in the past. Sunday.
Ireland’s 14-day national incidence rate has now risen to 209.6 according to the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet), as rates for each county have risen in line with the increasing number of daily cases.
HSE chief Paul Reid has said that the Covid-19 community’s positivity rate from testing is now 10 percent.
It comes as the HSE announced that it will start Covid-19 vaccination a day earlier than planned, with Ireland the third latest EU country to start delivering vaccines as the HSE grapples with staff training.
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