One in four people who visited a pub, club or restaurant last weekend did not have their Covid pass checked at the door, according to research for the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet).
Socialising is back to pre-pandemic levels or even higher with Covid infection increasing at a rate of 25 per cent week on week, Nphet said yesterday.
Professor Philip Nolan, the chairman of Nphet’s modelling group, said the surge in infection across almost all age groups was a strong signal to “wind back” social contact in order to bring the spread of the virus under control.
Nolan said hospital admissions were running at about 60 new cases per day, up 50 per cent on four weeks ago. The number in hospital on average over the past seven days was 493, higher than the preceding week.
He said hospitalisation levels were rising at about one per cent per day while the infection rate was increasing at two to three per cent per day. Although the number being admitted to ICU was high at six per day, it was too early to read any link between booster shots for older people and that divergence in numbers, Nolan added.
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However, he said that the high level of vaccination in Ireland was clearly interrupting a very large number of transmissions, notwithstanding the recent increase in infections.
“If we turned off everyone’s vaccination protection right now, within four or five days you would see somewhere north of 10,000 cases a day,” Nolan said. “And if nothing else changed, three or four days later there is no reason to believe you wouldn’t see [the rate increase to] four times that again.”
Nphet said that 3,174 new cases of Covid-19 were notified yesterday and 56 deaths have been registered over the past seven days, bringing the total number of Covid-related deaths to 5,492 since the beginning of the pandemic.
After a pause in the publication of vaccination data, HSE figures yesterday showed an increase with 95,000 people being vaccinated over the previous five days. However, the Department of Health said the new data could include a high number of booster shots being given to healthcare workers, vulnerable people aged over 65 and some of the older cohorts aged over 60 who were recently approved for booster vaccinations.
“We are in the territory now of saying to people you need to cut your social contacts,” he said. “If you are planning to see 15 people next week it would be better to see eight or nine.”
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He said Nphet was recommending a 30 per cent cut in social contacts which was “a significant but not an enormous effort from each and everyone one of us”.
Neither Nolan nor Dr Tony Holohan, the chief medical officer (CMO), voiced any enthusiasm for extending the vaccine booster programme to the wider population below the age of 60.
Nolan said it was a very big question to ask “whether we are going to re-medicate an entire population as a substitute for observing some basic public health measures like washing your hands and someone else wearing a mask”.
Holohan said: “We don’t see boosters as a potential control measure, particularly when we’re looking at the rising incidence and speed at which that is changing in all of the age groups as offering any significant potential in terms of a control measure around transmission.
“It has been [suggested] that we should simply boost people in order to prevent this level of transmission. As you see in many, many of the age groups in which we’re seeing this very rapidly rising transmission, they are not currently part of our plan in terms of boosting because we don’t believe that, as yet, the evidence is in favour of that. That may change in time.”