COVID DEATH TOLL PASSES 7,000
»»Scale of pandemic tragedy is revealed »»Thousands struck by virus over weekend
THE number of people who have died of Covid-19 in Ireland has surpassed 7,000.
The grim figure comes as the Department of Health confirmed that there were more than 6,800 new cases of the disease recorded over the weekend.
According to the Government’s Covid data hub, there have been 7,016 total deaths related to the virus up to yesterday.
Meanwhile, a health expert has said he did not communicate the Covid-19 models “as well as was necessary” to government ministers, weeks before Ireland had the world’s highest incidence of cases.
Professor Philip Nolan, who was a key member of the advisory group assisting the Government in the battle against Covid, made the comments at the University of Limerick yesterday.
The former head of National Public Health Emergency Team modelling said that as health experts, “we need to be better at communicating the range of possibilities and uncertainties”.
In January last year, Ireland’s rocketing rate of Covid-19 was blamed on the lifting of restrictions over Christmas and the prevalence of the highly transmissible UK variant of the virus.
The Government, which was heavily criticised at the time, defended its decision to relax restrictions in December 2020 despite advice from NPHET warning against the move.
Prof Nolan gave the keynote address at the event Learning from the Pandemic – the Power of Data in Public Health at UL.
Prof Nolan recalled that NPHET went to Cabinet and outlined what they thought would happen if the country were to open
up over Christmas 2020.
MISTAKES
He added: “We made a couple of mistakes in presenting this slide. We were at 200 cases a day and falling and we were going in and saying, ‘Look, things could go badly wrong here’.
“We said you could be back up through 400 cases a day in January, and that stuck in the mind of the hearer as a reassuring figure, as opposed to, ‘You’re accelerating through 400 massively’.”
Prof Nolan said they warned Government that opening up hospitality and household visits over Christmas would put the country “absolutely in the wrong place”.
He added: “What did that teach us? It taught us that we weren’t, I wasn’t communicating the outputs of these models as well as was necessary to properly inform.
“We need to be better at kind of communicating the range of possibilities and uncertainties.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Health confirmed that Saturday saw the highest number of Pcr-confirmed cases in the past three days.
The Health Protection Surveillance Centre was yesterday notified of 1,058 Pcr-confirmed cases, while on Sunday 1,188 people registered a positive antigen test through the HSE portal.
Some 1,547 Pcr-confirmed cases were notified on Saturday with 1,327 people registering a positive antigen test through the HSE portal the previous day.