A doctor has warned people to remain vigilant as there is still "an awful lot of Covid infection" going undiagnosed in Ireland.
Speaking to Newstalk, Dr Eoghan de Barra, an infectious disease consultant at Beaumont Hospital, said despite Covid cases in hospitals dropping, there is still plenty of infection spreading.
The most recent figures show that the number of hospital patients with the virus has dropped by 23% in a week, with 815 patients currently in hospital with Covid - down from 1,055 on July 11.
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The news prompted Tánaiste Leo Varadkar to tweet: "The peak of the summer wave has passed thankfully without any need for restrictions."
However, Dr de Barra warned that people should not see this as a sign allowing them to become complacent.
He said: "We have a positivity rate of about 30% at the moment for PCR tests - so that's unacceptablely high, that means we're missing an awful lot of infection.
"I don't think we need to have a sudden change in that strategy, but we need to have the ability to change.
"Because, again, these variants haven't posed a huge threat with our vaccinated population.
"But if that were to change, then we need to have the ability to switch that testing system back on.
"We need to have a surveillance system so that we know and can predict what's going to happen."
Asked if he believes the current wave of Covid is coming to an end, Dr de Barra said it is still too soon to say for sure if the summer wave is over.
He said: "Of course, with any of the waves, we only really know when we have consistent falls in numbers.
"And as we know at the moment, we don't have anything like the level of surveillance that we had in the past.
"But I'd certainly be optimistic and hope that that would be the case," he concluded.
The Government is now preparing for a winter wave which Mr Varadkar predicts will be "more serious and coincide with flu season."
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