Brace for peaks if people ignore social distancing - HSE chief
The country must brace itself for "significant peaks" in Covid-19 cases, with death rates set to soar if people do not start socially distancing.
Those were the warnings from the two of the country's leading health officials as 164 new cases were confirmed, 93 of them in Dublin.
HSE chief executive Paul Reid said the new normal in living with the virus will involve “significant peaks and, we hope, significant troughs very soon”.
“That is the new reality for us in terms of living with this virus and the transmission we have seen to date,” Mr Reid told the Oireachtas special committee on the response to Covid-19. He said as a consequence, health authorities are no longer thinking in terms of a second surge but rather in terms of “agility” and adaptability in terms of how services are scaled up and down.
Dr Ronan Glynn, acting chief medical officer, told the committee that unless people start making more effort to reduce their social interactions “there is no doubt the number of cases will rise”.
“If that happens we would be concerned about the effect on access to critical care, hospitalisations, and mortality,” he said.
Health Minister Stephen Donnelly warned of the impact on health services if the advice is not heeded.
“If we have to deal with a second surge in this country then the health care services will be severely curtailed,” Mr Donnelly said.
He said that a second country-wide lockdown remains very much on the table should a second surge of the virus serve to overwhelm the health services.
Earlier, UCC virologist Gerry Killeen claimed the country could have 1,000 cases of Covid-19 within eight weeks if the current trend continues and with the schools allowed to reopen.
He said the incidence numbers of Covid-19 are 10 times higher than they were in June.
"That has been over two months. In two months from now unless we change something it will be a thousand per day and two months after that there is no reason to believe it wouldn't be 10 thousand a day," he said, adding it is unsafe to open schools in the midst of what he believes is a critical juncture.
However, Philip Nolan, chair of the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group, told the Oireachtas committee that there is a “level of assurance” that the reopening of schools is being processed safely.
“It is very unlikely that if a child were to bring a disease into a school he or she would spread it to another child,” he said. “In no way is it an experiment. It is a carefully judged prioritisation of what we need to get back to.”
Chief clinical officer with the HSE Colm Henry said "inevitable" cases and outbreaks of Covid-19 in schools is a "price we must pay" in order to reopen the education sector.
Later at the committee, Mr Donnelly said he had “taken exception” to the GAA’s calling out of Dr Glynn after the introduction of heightened restrictions on August 18.
“The easiest thing in the world would have been NPHET just shutting down all sports,” he said adding that the public health team “recognise the incredibly important role sport plays in our society”.
“All they asked was that for three weeks, people didn’t spectate,” he said.
On a day when the ABP meat processing plant in Cahir in Co Tipperary became the latest factory to report an outbreak of the virus, with 22 cases, Mr Donnelly said that 22 of 23 random inspections of meat facilities across the country since the beginning of August have been unannounced.
This follows criticism suggesting that previous spikes in such settings could have been avoided if such inspections had been carried out unexpectedly.
The new cases reported yesterday bring the total here to 28,363. No new deaths were reported.
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