The number of people who have died with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic in Ireland has passed 7,000.
However, despite the death toll still rising slightly, the number of people in hospitals with the virus continues to decline.
Professor Sam McConkey, head of the Department of International Health and Tropical Medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, believes Ireland has done "exceptionally well" handling Covid.
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Speaking to Newstalk Breakfast, he said: "Now that we're two years a month shockingly through this journey, which has been fairly horrific for all of us, it's a good time to start looking back.
"A group from Seattle, published in The Lancet about two weeks ago, looking at what they call excess deaths in each country in the world over the last two years and this is very useful because many people have asked how many of the folk who actually have died with Covid have died because of Covid?"
He added: "That's a completely sensible, reasonable question because, of course, we are all on a journey of life and death and on each day in Ireland, there will be 70 to 100 people dying of something... some of those inevitably will be infected with Covid, especially in the three of four months where there has been an awful lot of cases around the fairly mild version of omicron and BA.2 but the people in their last two or four weeks of life from other things will also have been part of that omicron wave and BA.2 wave."
Prof McConkey said the Lancet report looked at the previous ten-year averages of death to see how many would have been expected in a usual year and then compared the number of deaths attributed to Covid.
He said: "Overall in 2020 and 2021 in Ireland, sadly one in 4,000 of our population were dead above and beyond what would have been expected based on the changes of death from the previous ten years."
He added: "The worst in the world was shockingly Bulgaria and Bolivia [which] had one in 70 of their population had excess deaths.
"That's like 1.3%, that would be the equivalent of 70,000 deaths in Ireland - we never approached anything like that".
Overall, Ireland had approximately 1,200 extra deaths above what would have been expected in 2020 and 2021.
Prof McConkey also said that Ireland's economy also managed to withstand the pandemic better than other countries.
He said: "In retrospect, in terms of the countries around the world, we've done exceptionally well.
"Economically, somehow, we have come out of this outbreak with our economy reasonably intact.
"I know it's facing problems with [the] high price of oil and inflation, but that's a different issue.
"But in terms of our economic performance through and during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, Ireland has also come out of that very robustly.
"So both economically and healthwise, we've come out of this exceptionally well compared to Europe and America".
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