Death toll from COVID-19 has risen to nearly 3,000 in Ireland; CMO says rate of transmission is declining
DUBLIN: Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer stated that the country is in a very critical situation with regard to COVID-19 patients and related deaths. The death toll has risen to 2,970, with the health department confirming 23 more coronavirus-related deaths yesterday. A total of 1,931 people infected with the virus are being treated at the hospital with 218 in the intensive care unit.
Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tony Holohan said that this is a critical time for all of us to hold firm to the public health advice, as the rate of virus spread in the community is starting to decline. He also reminded that no one should reduce care and guard against this “highly infectious disease”.
“There is a huge volume of disease in the country and the recent surge in cases continues to place an unprecedented strain on ICUs, hospitals and other frontline healthcare services,” Dr. Holohan said.
Meanwhile, Chief Executive Officer of the HSE, Paul Reid, said it would not matter if the number of ICU admissions did not increase in the coming days, but the increasing mortality rate is a concern.
“We are seeing huge difference in terms of delayed exits from our ICU, and indeed, sadly, increased mortality.”
“If you look at the pipeline of patients potentially coming into ICU, there are still 430 patients who are receiving critical care outside of the ICU. They would be retrieving various levels of advanced respiratory support. Two-thirds of those would generally be discharged at some point in time, but one-third would possibly go through ICU or indeed sadly in some cases mortality,” Paul Reid said.
“There’s a very significant, unfortunately, pipeline we would see continuing into ICU. And I would expect that we will see ICU numbers probably holding if not growing in the coming days, and that’s a real challenge for us,” he said.
He said the INMO’s concern about the lack of face masks was unfounded. Dr. Holohan said there is enough supply of face masks for all healthcare workers who need them. Mr. Reid said that there is a supply of up to 1.3 million face masks per week. He added that 500,000 antigen tests will be conducted to assess the outbursts in the hospitals and it will be available in the hospital system from January 27.
Of the cases confirmed yesterday:
643 were men and 730 were women. 58% are under 45 years of age, while the median age is 39 years old.
Most of the new COVID-19 cases are in Dublin; 379 cases. 145 in Cork, 86 in Wexford, 85 in Galway, 71 in Limerick, and the remaining 612 cases are spread across all other counties.
The infection rate has dropped to 840.7 per 100,000 people. The highest transmission rate is in Monaghan (1661.56) and the lowest is in Leitrim (280.9).
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