Ireland has passed the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic this year, according to the country’s deputy Chief Medical Officer (CMO).
Dr Ronan Glynn said he was hopeful the nation would not have to experience what happened in January again, when the country’s third surge of infection saw more cases confirmed than in all of 2020.
More than 1,000 deaths linked to Covid-19 and more than 100,000 cases of the virus were confirmed in the first month of 2021.
On Monday evening, the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) reported “steady progress” against all indicators of the disease, with the latest figures showing 829 new cases and six deaths.
Meanwhile, the number of people hospitalised with the virus was down around 46 per cent from its peak last month to 1,100, while 175 patients were in intensive care units (ICU).
I think there are many reasons to have confidence that that’s the case
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Dr Glynn said there are many reasons to be optimistic.
“We have already passed what is the worst of this disease this year and that we will not have to go back through what we went through in January again,” he said.
“I think there are many reasons to have confidence that that’s the case — first and foremost is the performance of the population over the past number of weeks and their willingness to keep going with these measures.
“On top of that, we have vaccination being rolled out.”
Case projection
Professor Philip Nolan, chairman of Nphet's epidemiological modelling advisory group, said Ireland remains on track to record 200 to 400 cases a day by the end of February if the effort to stay home continues.
“If we continue to act as a society for the next three or four weeks, the way we have been acting for the past five weeks, then yes we're still on track,” he said.
“It's important not to become disheartened by the fact that progress appears to be slower as you're going down that exponential decline.”
Amid confirmation that 11 cases of the South African variant of the virus have been detected in Ireland, Dr Glynn urged adherence to public health advice.
“Viruses can’t mutate if they’re not replicating,” he said.
“So the fewer the amount of virus we have in this country, the less chance there is of a mutation that’s going to have a knock-on impact on vaccine effectiveness.”
Dr Glynn said a study suggesting the AstraZeneca vaccine was less effective against the South African variant was not conclusive, and that it was too early to reach this conclusion.
Meanwhile, the latest Covid-19 vaccine update for the State has shown over 230,000 doses administered so far.
230,776 vaccine doses were administered as of Friday, February 5th. This includes 151,212 people who have received their first dose and 79,554 people who have received their second dose.
This figure represents 4.64 per cent of the population who have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
