Over 3,500 lives saved by social restrictions, says Simon Harris

Social restrictions in place for the past month have saved more than 3,500 lives according to Department of Health modelling, Simon Harris has told the Dáil.

The Minister for Health said the coronavirus reproductive rate, or “R” number, remains stable at between 0.5 and 0.8.

He also indicated that some private hospital capacity could be used for elective procedures as concerns were raised about patients with non-coronavirus illnesses, including children.

Fianna Fáil health spokesman Stephen Donnelly highlighted the case of a five-year-old boy with Down syndrome who only began walking a year ago and required an MRI scan for suspected arthritis which would not be scheduled until next year.

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Mr Donnelly said Callum, from Wicklow, was in constant pain and needed physiotherapy twice a week but had not had it for six weeks. The Wicklow TD asked why physiotherapists using personal protective equipment could not deal with such urgent cases.

Treating patients

He also called for empty diagnostic suites in private hospitals, operating theatres and entire clinical teams still not treating patients to be used for cases like Callum’s.

Mr Harris said that about 33 per cent of private hospital capacity is being used with some hospitals at 50 per cent.

“I absolutely want to see these assets fully utilised for the benefit of public patients as well,” he said. The Minister said they were now going to have to make a call on the “ appropriate level of allocation” for both coronavirus and non-coronavirus cases to make sure their services can continue to operate.

In private hospitals, “we will need to keep capacity free because a surge could come, a second phase could come”. But “we can do more than we’re doing now. So we’ve seen a number of cases of people being treated quite significantly increase, we need to see it increase further. And I’ll look at the area of Callum’s case and cases like that.”

Speaking in the Dáil about the reproductive transmission rate of coronavirus, Mr Harris said a person with the disease was now passing it on to less than one person as opposed to 2.4 people when restrictions began on March 27th. He said if the epidemic continued at that rate 4,800 people would have lost their lives and “our modelling suggests we would have 2,200 people today seriously ill in critical care”.

Progress

He said that sadly, 1,190 lives have been lost to the virus and “up to 40 people a day are still being hospitalised with Covid-19”.

“Between three to four people are being admitted to intensive care every day.”

He said they had made significant progress but “if we want to give the country the best chance of success, we must continue with the work”.

Mr Harris said “we must guard against any sense of invincibility. Some people are more vulnerable to this virus but everyone is vulnerable to this highly infectious disease”.

He also said the target for overall testing “is 100,000 tests per week operating on a seven-day week basis for a minimum of six months from mid-May”.