Covid reopening fallout: Experts warned Government a storm was coming

A member of the State's health modelling group has said the advice given to the Government regarding the reopening of hospitality is akin to 'warning someone sitting on a beach that there’s a storm coming'. 

A senior figure in a government advisory group on Covid-19 has said the country's biggest concern should be people who are partially or fully vaccinated becoming ill from the virus. 

Cathal Walsh, a professor of statistics at the University of Limerick and a member of the 30-strong Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group (IEMAG), said the advice that led to the Government delaying the reopening of indoor dining only emerged in the last week. 

At present, the Pfizer vaccine is believed to be about 90% effective in preventing contraction of the Delta variant, with 44% of the Irish adult population fully vaccinated.

“The key is to cut transmission. If you can do that, you avoid the danger,” Prof Walsh said. 

“Think of it like measles. We don’t get epidemics anymore because we’re vaccinated, so we get outbreaks and sporadic cases and mostly we avoid large mortality. The same is true with the Delta variant.

The biggest risk at present is the future threat. It’s like sitting on a beach and someone tells you that there’s a storm coming.

“What you want to do is avoid the storm, to prepare for it. I think we’re able to do that. It’s like if you’re walking in a particular direction, and you hear that if you keep walking that way you’ll fall over a height. So we need to turn, to find another way, to avoid that fall,” he said.

Mr Walsh said what is lost in the current furore over the delayed reopening of indoor dining is the fact that “the epidemiology at the moment is very positive”.

“We have low case and hospitalisation numbers,” Prof Walsh said. 

The National Public Health Emergency Team's (Nphet) advice to the Government on Monday, on foot of the modelling advice of the IEMAG, said the reopening of indoor hospitality should be “paused” until a “robust, non-reproducible, and enforceable system of verification of vaccination” can be put in place.

The advice stemmed from a number of modelling scenarios, the most pessimistic of which would see nearly 700,000 cases of Covid-19 in Ireland between July and the end of September, and as many as 2,170 deaths. 

That advice has led to a political storm, with government sources expressing their unhappiness at being dealt such a "bad hand" by Nphet. 

The opposition is demanding to know why the Government was taken by surprise given that the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant, which first emerged in India, has been known about for more than four months. 

They also point out that Ireland’s dining regime will now be more restrictive than most other countries. 

“We did see this coming, we did see the risk, but the most relevant information has only been published in the last number of weeks,” Mr Walsh said. 

“The ECDC [European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control] report [on the threat of the spread of Delta] only came out a week ago, so the detailed data only came out very recently, there was huge uncertainty before that.”

“It has only become clear in the last week or two that this is a very real concern,” he said.

He said there are other solutions as well, which Nphet did not highlight.

“Ventilation, that’s the key,” he said. “We need to take precautions for airborne transmission.”