Almost 12,000 new Covid cases have been confirmed in Ireland amid concern about how the current surge could impact hospital numbers.
Officials reported 5,263 positive PCR tests and 6,466 positive antigen tests on Monday. There are 1,624 patients in hospital with Covid - a rise of 56 on Sunday - and of those, 54 are in ICU.
However, senior Government sources have told the Irish Mirror that they would expect up to 2,000 people in hospital “in the next week.”
READ MORE: Government concerned about surging cases but not planning to bring back restrictions
Despite this, they played down suggestions there would be any significant movement from the Government to bring back any restrictions, saying the “only thing possible” is stricter messaging and rules on mask wearing - but they appeared to say it would serve as a “marginal benefit at this stage.”
It comes after a senior doctor described the current pressure on hospitals as the worst he’s seen in his entire career.
The president of the Irish Association of Emergency Medicine, Dr Fergal Hickey, there are large numbers of patients on trolleys and hospitals are “teeming with Covid”.
“That’s the reality of it, the elastic band has broken at this stage.
“They’re [people] arriving for all kinds of reasons but what we’re discovering is that there is a proportion of patients who are not symptomatic and turn out to have Covid.
“We cannot admit them to a bed adjacent to somebody who is vulnerable, so we have to find a means of trying to isolate them and that’s really difficult in practice.”
It’s believed the current wave is being driven by the highly-transmissible BA.2 variant of Covid, however the Head of the HSE has said failure by people to get vaccinated or get their booster is one of the factors behind Covid hospital numbers.
Paul Reid warned that the healthcare system is facing “huge stress”, saying that the highest hospital numbers occurred in January 2021 and the HSE is “getting close to those levels now,”
“When we look at hospitalisations at the moment, 35% of those who are positive with Covid haven’t had a vaccine and 50% of people in ICU haven’t had a booster,” he said.
When asked if this Covid wave might be peaking, Mr Reid told RTE there were no indications to suggest the virus was on a downward trend. And he warned that there is evidence in other countries that Covid would peak in a few weeks, but that Irish hospitals expected to be dealing with this wave “throughout April”.
READ MORE: Symptoms of rampant BA.2 variant, NPHET replacement and restrictions update
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