Delta wave to peak in September, warns Nphet member

Professor Philip Nolan, Chair of the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group at a Nphet press conference. Picture: Paddy Cummins /Collins Dublin

The chair of Nphet’s Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group, Professor Philip Nolan, has warned that the peak of Delta cases has not yet been reached.

“It’s coming soon,” he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland.

“We should reach that in the course of September, we should by that point, by international standards have a very high level of protection and from that point, the level of infections in the population should start to slowly decline and then over time the risk of catching or spreading the disease should reach the lowest points in the course of late September, October, November, December,” he said.  

Later, the Nphet member told Newstalk Breakfast that the current case numbers were showing that the vaccination programme wasn’t finished yet.

“There's a quarter of the adult population not yet fully protected, largely younger people with very high levels of social contact, and the disease is spreading rapidly in that population, that is a worry,” he said. Prof Nolan appealed to the public “get your vaccine, get your second dose, wait two weeks before believing you have a level of protection.

We have to come up with a plan to ease restrictions, the strategy was to reach high levels of protection, we're all waiting for the same destination to return our lives to as near normal as possible.

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 Prof Nolan rejected the suggestion that modelling did not take the vaccination levels into account when Nphet was advising the government on public health restrictions earlier this summer. 

“All of the modelling we do takes vaccination rates into account - the levels of vaccine uptake we're seeing are higher than we might have expected and that's really good news for us as a population and we should be proud of that,” he said on Newstalk.

Unfortunately, the numbers admitted to hospital and into intensive care will increase over the next two to three weeks at least, he added on RTÉ. 

“We're all really tired - it's 541 days since we reported our first case, what's happening here is we haven't reached that level of vaccination protection that we would like to have,” he said.  

Of the 200 admissions to ICU between April and now, three-quarters of those had no vaccination, only one in 20, about 5% were 14 days beyond completing their vaccination regimen. 

“So 19 out of 20 people that were admitted to ICU over the past several months had no vaccination or were partially vaccinated. The vast majority were eligible for vaccination. We’re seeing an increase in the number of younger people, people under 45, mostly with underlying conditions,” he said. 

Prof Nolan said that it had been anticipated that there would be slower uptake for the 12 to 15 years age group, but that nonetheless, the entire vaccination process was well on target.