NPHET expert gives update on whether Ireland could exit Level Five lockdown early

An NPHET expert has said that Ireland is unlikely to emerge from a Level Five lockdown early.

Promising trends have emerged amid signs that virus growth here is slowing and possibly even slowing.

The number of new cases announced by health officials each day has also fallen below 1,000 during the past seven days.

There has also been a steady drop in the number of close contacts reported by cases.

However, NPHET member Dr. Cillian De Gascun, president of the National Virus Reference Laboratory, rejected suggestions that this progress would mean we would exit Level Five before the planned December 1 deadline.

He said the focus is on getting the number of cases as low as possible before December.

The NPHET expert claims that the lower our number of active cases at the end of this lockdown, the longer we can keep the numbers down.

Dr. De Gascun told RTE Radio One: “It is too early to say what success is going to be. From a social perspective, we want this number to be as low as possible, because the lower we get to December, the higher it will be. the benefit that we will obtain from the interventions we have implemented.

“I think it’s really important that even though the numbers for the last few days have been positive, we still have more than 300 people in the hospital, in or around 50 people in intensive care, and even though yesterday’s 460 odd cases are better than 1,200, we had a week ago, within those numbers, people will end up in the hospital, people will end up in intensive care, and sadly some people will pass away.

“It is very important that people continue to stick with the intervention and do not consider releasing them early at this time.

“The plan at this stage is that we have a six-week schedule to go as low as possible to ensure that we can suppress the virus again and return to the levels we had in the summer ideally.”