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Updated 58 minutes ago
THE PRESIDENT of Ireland’s Epidemiological Modeling Advisory Group, Professor Philip Nolan, has said that Ireland could see between 3,000 and 6,000 cases a day at the peak of the third wave.
Speaking on RTÉ Saturday with Katie Hannon, Nolan said the current growth in virus numbers is exponential, with an increase of between 10% and 11% every day.
According to Nolan, this makes the numbers harder to predict.
“Because it is exponential growth, and each day is 10% or 11% greater than the day before, very small marginal changes in that level of growth give you very different results in a week or 10 days.”
Nolan said that the current growth rate of Covid-19 is compatible with a reproduction rate of between 1.8 and 2, beating the estimate in recent weeks of between 1.6 and 1.8.
There are expected to be more than 3,000 new Covid-19 cases confirmed tonight, including some of the 9,000 pending cases Nolan reported yesterday.
“We have to prepare for some really worrying numbers in the coming days, both in the number of cases and in the hospital system.”
Currently, there are 581 Covid-19 patients treated in the hospital, with 56 in the ICU. There have been 73 hospital admissions in the last 24 hours.
According to Nolan, Ireland is currently on a trajectory where health services could be impacted due to the influx of Covid-19 patients.
“We are now at a point where our health services are threatened unless from now on we fully enter into the spirit of the measures introduced by the government. We need a response from the entire population here. “
Report delays
Nolan said there are generally 24-hour delays to allow positive tests to be validated.
However, due to the high volume of positive tests in recent days, this has caused delays of between 48 and 72 hours, which has generated an accumulation of around 9,000 cases that are expected to be reported in the coming days.
According to Nolan, he expects the issues to be resolved within the next week.
“At the rate these colleagues are managing to do this, we expect the issue to be resolved within five to seven days.”
The HSE has said that the Computerized Infectious Disease Reporting (CIDR) system faced connectivity issues due to the large volume of Covid-19 cases being uploaded to it.
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“We have started to implement a plan to solve this problem and our goal is to get the CIDR system up and running at a normal level of performance as soon as possible,” said an HSE spokesperson.
“Meanwhile, there is a discrepancy between the daily number of reported COVID-19 cases and the daily number of positive laboratory results.
Even considering that some positive lab results come from second tests and are therefore not new cases, the IT system continues to underestimate the total number of positive tests by a certain amount.
The spokesperson also confirmed that there will be no limits to the number of cases that can be reported in a single day.
“CIDR’s maximum capacity is not limited to 2,000 cases per day and we expect to report well above that number every day for the next several days.
Along with this, the spokesperson said that while the contact tracing system is busy, it is not experiencing delays due to the problems that are being experienced with the CIDR system.
According to the spokesperson, due to widespread community transmission of the virus, the delay in notification will not affect the advice given to the public or the management of the disease from a public health perspective.
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