Pharmacies report ‘huge’ increase in Covid-19 antigen test sales

There has been a “huge” increase in the sales of rapid antigen tests due to the current high levels of Covid-19 in the community, say pharmacists.

Jack Shanahan, owner of Haven Pharmacy in Castleisland, Co Kerry, said sales of antigen tests were now as high as at any other point in the pandemic.

“It’s like a U-shape curve, it dropped off completely and now has shot up ... There is no doubt there is a huge amount of Covid in the community, it’s rampant,” he said.

The pharmacy was selling “a lot of tests”, as well as face masks, he told The Irish Times. “In my experience of Covid, this wave of it, it’s never [been] more ubiquitous,” he said.

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Mr Shanahan said while there had been a surge in demand for the rapid tests, most people in public spaces such as supermarkets were no longer wearing face coverings, which he described as “contradictory behaviour”.

There had been a “little bit of uptick” in the numbers of people coming to the pharmacy to receive Covid-19 booster vaccines. “The urgency that was there before is just not there,” he said.

[ What is going on with Covid-19 in Ireland now? ]

There appeared to be a “lack of fear” about Covid-19 now, in part as most people who contracted the virus would only experience mild symptoms, he said.

Dr Colm Henry, Health Service Executive (HSE) chief clinical officer, said the country was nearing the peak of the current wave of infections.

Ireland was now in week four or five of a six-week plateau, after which case numbers in the community are expected to decline, he said.

Latest HSE figures show there were 881 people in hospital with Covid-19 on Thursday evening, and 32 in intensive care.

Dr Henry called for people to come forward to get booster vaccines. Those who were not vaccinated or had not yet been boosted were “disproportionally” represented in hospital figures, he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland.

People aged 65 and over and the immunocompromised are eligible to receive a second booster vaccine, although only half of those cohorts have received the additional shots.

Dr Henry said about half of the people in hospital with Covid-19 had been admitted with other conditions and subsequently tested positive for the virus, but the same preventive measures had to be put in place to stop the spread of the virus to the vulnerable.

A range of tests were now in place to determine the level of the virus in the community, including PCR tests — of which 41,000 were carried out last week and 36 per cent were positive, he said.

The highest proportion of officially recorded Covid-19 cases last week was among those 35-44 years old, which accounted for a fifth of cases.

There were 14,983 positive PCR tests as well as 20,834 positive antigen tests self-reported to the HSE, according to a weekly Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) report.

The report said this was a 23 per cent increase in the number of people reporting positive antigen tests compared with the week before.

The county with the highest recorded incidence of the disease was Limerick, followed by Laois, Louth, Galway and Westmeath, the HPSC report said.

Of 271 confirmed cases of Covid-19 recorded among those over 85 years old last week, a third were hospitalised with the virus, as were a quarter of the 516 people aged between 75-84 recorded as testing positive last week.