One death and 190 new Covid-19 cases as medic warns against 'age-related apartheid'
One more person has died of Covid-19 and 190 new cases of the virus have been diagnosed, the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) has confirmed.
This latest fatality brings the total number of Covid-19 related deaths in Ireland to 1,775.
Newly confirmed cases of coronavirus jumped from 56 on Monday to 190 on Tuesday. There are now 27,499 confirmed cases after four confirmed cases were denotified by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre.
Of the new cases, 111 are women, 76 are men, and 75% of the new cases are aged under-45.
Seventy-five cases are associated with outbreaks or are close contacts of a confirmed case while 14 cases were spread in the community from unknown sources.
Kildare has the highest number of new cases with 48, followed by Dublin with 46, Tipperary with 38, Limerick with 20, and Clare with 7.
The rest of the 31 cases are in Carlow, Cork, Kerry, Kilkenny, Laois, Louth, Meath, Offaly, Waterford, Wexford, and Wicklow.
The HSE is working to identify any contacts the patients may have had to prevent further spread.
Dr Ronan Glynn, Acting Chief Medical Officer with the Department of Health, said: “As we learn to live with this disease, we need to strike a balance between enjoying our lives and behaving responsibly. By reducing our social contacts and following the public health advice we can suppress this virus.
We have seen #covid19 case numbers rising across the country this week. We must do all we can to avoid a return to where we were in March & April. Social distancing applies to all age groups - wherever you are this weekend please keep your distance. #holdfirm
— Dr Ronan Glynn (@ronan_glynn) August 14, 2020
“To keep our shops, hotels, restaurants, and sporting activities open, we need every household to play its part and every workplace and organisation to provide a safe environment so that we can protect our loved ones, safeguard the most vulnerable, protect our health services, and ensure children get back to school in the coming weeks.”
Dr Scally was commenting on the suggestion that older people would be asked to comply with further restrictions to prevent the transmission of the virus hours before the Government announced that they should restrict their movements, limit the number of people they see outside the home to six and only shop at designated times.
However, recent cases were predominantly among young people while older people were “doing their best to dodge this deadly virus,” he told Newstalk’s .
“I can see how stopping house parties would be valuable," Dr Scally said.
"But I do have a kind of a worry that we're heading into some sort of an age-related apartheid approach to Covid-19.”
Dr Scally said that widespread and efficient testing must be central to the Government’s strategy.
"Individual measures may make a difference, but let's get the strategy right and at the core of that has to be the testing. Testing is absolutely crucial and seeing those times drift out to four days is really unacceptable at this stage of this terrible virus.”
Testing times should be much closer to 24 hours with wider local testing, he said, saying that less intrusive saliva testing was “coming down the line”.
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