Numbers visiting nursing home residents to be restricted

The number of visitors nursing home residents are allowed is to be restricted to four nominated people in the coming days.

Dr Ronan Glynn, acting chief medical officer, said the “small change” would be required to limit the size of a residents’ network of visitors for the next three weeks. The number of times those four individuals can visit residents will not be restricted.

The change was discussed at a meeting of the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) on Thursday.

Public health officials also discussed plans for an “alternative way” of testing children for coronavirus following the planned reopening of schools, Dr Glynn said.

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This could include taking a swab of saliva, or a swab from just inside of the nose, rather than the standard coronavirus test.

Dr Siobhán Ni Bhrian, the Health Service Executive (HSE) integrated care lead, said public health guidance around children returning to school would be released next week.

The guidance would include how to keep school uniforms clean, but Dr Ni Bhrian said she recognised “it would be hard for a family of four children to wash the uniform every night.”

Professor Philip Nolan, chair of NPHET’s modelling group, said he believed the anxiety over schools reopening was “misplaced.” School classrooms were a controlled environment and “not a big driver” of coronavirus transmission, he said.

Judgement

Under new restrictions over-70s are encouraged to limit their social interactions. Families would have to exercise their “individual judgement” around whether grandparents should mind children after schools reopen, Dr Glynn said. This should include an assessment “based on the health of the grandparent, [and] the health of the child,” he said.

There have been a further 136 cases of coronavirus confirmed in the State and one more death, NPHET said.

This brings the total number of Covid-19 related fatalities to 1,776, and the total number of confirmed cases to 27,676.

NPHET also discussed on Thursday the possible lifting of the restrictions on the three midland counties which were introduced earlier this month.

Of the 136 news cases, 51 were in Dublin, 24 in Kildare, 12 in Kilkenny, 11 in Tipperary, seven in Cork, six in Limerick and Wexford, five in Meath, with the rest spread across nine other counties.

The results of a study carried out over June and July estimated the national prevalence of Covid-19 was 1.7 per cent of the population. This meant three times more people had contracted the virus than had been recorded in the number of confirmed cases.

Dr Derval Igoe, principal investigator on the study, said this was a positive sign, as other countries who conducted similar surveys had found tenfold increases when compared to their confirmed cases. The results meant “the vast majority” of the Irish population remain susceptible to the virus, she said.

Reproductive rate drop

The study tested for Covid-19 antibodies in participants aged between 12 and 69, in Dublin and Sligo. Some 33 per cent of people who had antibodies from the virus reported that they had lost their sense of taste or smell, Dr Igoe said.

Prof Nolan said public health officials were seeing a “sustained high level of new cases being confirmed per day.”

“We were looking at three counties, now we are looking at 15 or 16 counties where the incidence is high,” Prof Nolan said. There was a growing number of cases being transmitted in “an unknown way out in the community,” he said.

However, Prof Nolan said the R-number, which is the reproductive rate of the virus, has now dropped to around 1.2.

Following a recent number of “explosive outbreaks”, in sites such as meat plants, the R-number had increased to around 1.6 earlier this month, but was now falling, he said.