IRELAND HAS passed the worst part of the Covid-19 pandemic, a public health expert has said.
Speaking yesterday at a public health briefing in which a further 829 cases and 6 deaths were announcer, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Ronan Glynn said Ireland appeared to have passed the peak of the disease.
Public efforts and restrictions has managed to reduce the number of daily cases from nearly 9,000 at the beginning of January to under 1,000 for the past few days; the numbers of people in hospital with the disease has also fallen.
Dr Glynn yesterday said that, now, there are many reasons to be optimistic, and the country will not have to go through something of this scale again.
"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," he continued.
"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.”
Also speaking yesterday was Professor Philip Nolan, the head of the National Public Health Emergency Team's epidemiological modelling advisory group, who projected that at the rate things are gong, Ireland could see daily cases of between 200 - 400 by the end of February.
Worryingly, 11 cases of the new South African variant of the disease have been identified in Ireland, but Professor Nolan reminded people that "viruses can’t mutate if they’re not replicating", and encouraged everyone to keep sticking to the rules.
As of yesterday evening, there has now been a total of 204,397 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ireland and 3,687 deaths after the denotification of 5 deaths.
More than 230,000 people in Ireland have received a vaccination, with 151,212 having received their first dose and 79,554 having received their first and second dose.
