Increase in Covid cases driven by Omicron variant set to ‘kick off’, says Paul Reid

The health service is heading into the holiday period with a much higher level of demand than last year, according to its chief executive.

An increase in cases driven by the Omicron variant looks set to "kick off" but it is not possible yet to be certain about what will happen, Paul Reid told a media briefing on Wednesday.

He said there were 431 Covid-19 patients in hospital, including 102 in ICU – this compares to 238 and 25 on the same day in 2020, he pointed out. The figures later reduced to 429 in hospital and 100 in ICU, with 6,307 new coronavirus cases confirmed. An additional 55 deaths were also confirmed in the last even days.

In this week last year, 87,000 PCR tests were carried out, while in the past week 210,000 PCR tests were performed and 50,000 antigen tests were sent to close contacts.

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Mr Reid said the first Covid-19 vaccines were administered last St Stephen’s Day, when 9,700 people received a dose; on Wednesday, 108,000 doses were administered.

Hospitals will be busy over the holiday period and there will be delays, he warned. Health staff are anxious and fearful about the period of uncertainty ahead, and are expecting cases to rise in the coming days.

He said demand for testing for increasing. “In volume terms, it looks like it’s going to kick off,” he said.

HSE chief clinical officer Dr Colm Henry said numbers in ICU have been dropping gradually but Covid-19 patients still account for one-third of the total figure.

The proportion of hospitalisations in over-65s has fallen from 10 per cent to 3.8 per cent since November as more older people received their booster, he said. In contrast, cases among 19-24-year-olds are up over one-quarter.

Dr Henry noted that hospitalisations in South Africa’s Omicron wave appear to be falling but said it was too early to say if the same could happen here. Even if cases convert into hospitalisations at a lower rate than before, this could still place the health service under significant pressure.

Second in Europe

Just over half (53 per cent) of Covid-19 patients in hospital at present are not fully vaccinated, while 54 per cent of patients in ICU are unvaccinated.

Unvaccinated cases were two times more likely to be hospitalised, in the period mid-November to mid-December, according to data presented to the briefing. Meanwhile, fully vaccinated cases were four times less likely to be admitted to ICU.

The HSE continues to administer primary vaccines to 17,000-18,000 people a week, Mr Reid said, and over 94 per cent of the adult population is now immunised.

So far, 1.75 million booster and third doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered, including 353,000 last week.

Mr Reid said Ireland ranks second in Europe for the proportion of adults administered a booster shot, and third for the proportion of the population who have received the extra dose.

Later this week, the HSE will indicate when it intends to start administering booster doses to younger adults, Mr Reid said.

He said he had no concerns about the number of healthcare staff who have not received a booster. So far, about 245,000 out of an estimated 330,000 healthcare workers have been administered the third dose.

The HSE experiences a “big churn” of staff, he pointed out, with over 9,000 leaving this year.

Some 3,800 healthcare staff are out of work due to Covid-19, down from over 5,000 three to four weeks ago, the briefing heard.