Speaking at a NPHET briefing last night, Professor Philip Nolan commented that the current situation is "twice as precarious" as it was back in December last year, adding that "we need to be immensely careful" when restrictions ease so as to not let virus levels surge again.
"We're at about 500 cases a day now. In early December we were at 250 cases a day, half that. From early December to the end of December, we went from 250 cases a day to six and a half thousand cases a day with about half the prevalence of the B117 variant that we have now.
"So, I think when we look back on December, the one thing that we should extract from it is that even when you suppress this virus to moderate levels - not low levels, but moderate levels - you're in an enormously precarious situation there. And right now, the situation is twice as precarious as it was back then because we've gone from less than 50 per cent B117 to 90 per cent B117.
"So, all pre-Christmas tells us that when we get to March, April and May, we need to be immensely careful that the level that we have succeeded in suppressing the disease to doesn't turn around and bite us in the space of a few very short weeks."
Asked whether he would argue that it wasn't so much the reopening as the UK variant that caused the third surge, Professor Nolan responded by saying that social mixing was to blame.
"What caused the third surge was social mixing. And of course at Christmas which spread the disease, and also in that accelerated spreading, created the opportunity for the B117 variant to become dominant quickly. More quickly than it otherwise might have. It would have become dominant if accelerated by a week or two at most."
Describing the NPHET briefing as "very encouraging", Minister Simon Harris said that "it's good to see pretty much every metric going in the right direction". Confirming that government will review the current set of restrictions in advance of April 5th, he later said that it's about "slow, steady, cautious reopening".
https://twitter.com/rtenews/status/1369217718931587072
The Department of Health yesterday reported 437 new cases of Covid-19 and no further deaths.
