Holohan alarmed over reckless house parties
CHIEF Medical Officer Tony Holohan is alarmed over house parties being organised with apparent ‘abandon’, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
As a restless public moves into Phase Two of the reopening plan, he warned that all indoor activities such as house parties should not take place.
‘House parties are being organised with abandon, it seems to me, as though we weren’t in the midst of a pandemic,’ he said. ‘So that’s a continuing cause for concern irrespective almost of the phase that we’re in.
‘There will become a point in time where we think certain activities that are indoor in nature can happen in controlled ways but we are not at a point now where we think that house parties and gathering indoors is appropriate.’
He was conscious that it appears the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) are ‘trying to identify every part of pleasurable activity in life and finding some ways of recommending against it.
‘Individual personal behaviour, intimacy, house parties, all of these things we are recommending against but there are really good public health reasons why we think now is not the time for some of these activities to happen,’ he said.
And Health Minister Simon Harris told the Dáil the reproductive rate for Covid-19 had increased slightly for the first time in several weeks. The coronavirus death toll in Ireland rose to 1,664 yesterday, after another five deaths were announced. There were 38 new confirmed cases of, taking the total since the outbreak began to 25,142.
Mr Harris said the figures indicated the reproduction number – the number of people an infected person infects –was now between 0.4 and 0.7. In recent weeks, it has been stable at between 0.5 and 0.6. The rate of transmission increased slightly.
He warned against speeding up the road map too quickly, adding: ‘After so many weeks of hardship and sacrifice, I am conscious that we have a strong wish to leave this virus behind and move to better times. I’m also conscious of the reality we live in. While the progress we have made has allowed us to re-open the country, we must absolutely remain cautious and clear-sighted about where we are.
‘We have successfully interrupted the transmission of this disease but it has not gone away – it has not been eliminated and it is still here and still with us.’
The chairman of NPHET Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group Professor Philip Nolan said any increase on last week’s reproduction rate is ‘marginal’. He said: ‘We still are confident that it is significantly below one. When the number of cases gets very, very low it gets difficult to estimate how the disease is spreading in the population. It is good news that it is hard to estimate what the reproduction number is.’
Today, the Government is set to announce how the country will progress into Phase Two.
‘We’re in middle of a pandemic’