Health Minister Stephen Donnelly is hopeful we have passed the peak of the current BA.2 wave of Covid-19.
It comes as the emergency powers brought in two years ago to cope with the pandemic lapsed at midnight on Thursday.
Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, has said that we are “hopefully” passed the peak of the recent surge in Covid-19 cases.
However, he said there was “cautious optimism” in relation to the indications.
“The five-day rolling average is falling. The positivity rate is falling. The indications are hopefully now we are past the peak,” he told Bryan Dobson on RTE’s News At One.
“What we’ve seen in some other countries when they have passed this peak is there has been quite a rapid decline in cases and really what we’re looking to is, obviously what I’m looking to as Minister for Health, is to see a decline in cases in hospitals because of the huge pressure.”
Today, there were 10,839 new infections reported, with 5,750 PCR-confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 5,089 positive antigen tests registered through the HSE portal.
This is an 83% reduction compared to this day last week when 19,866 new cases were reported, RTE reports.
Hospital numbers also appear to be decreasing, with 1,472 people in hospital this morning. This is a decrease of 63 people from yesterday’s numbers.
59 of those in hospital today are being treated in ICU, which is an increase of one from yesterday.
Minister Donnelly said: “What we’ve seen previously is that when cases fall, the hospitalisation admission rates tend to fall about a week later. Then, the ICU admission rates tend to fall about a week after that.
“Hopefully what we're going to see is an easing of pressure on the hospitals.”
It comes as what the Minister described as “draconian” powers ended at midnight on Thursday.
“Really what we’re doing is moving from the emergency phase of Covid to a medium-term living with Covid,” he said.
Donnelly said that it was “important” that we moved away from the “legal requirement” for people to comply or face being fined or even arrested.
That being said, he reiterated that public health advice still stood.
“If we’re on public transport, if we’re in crowded places, obviously, if we're going to a healthcare setting, a nursing home, if we're visiting someone who’s higher risk, the advice is still very clearly to wear a mask in those settings but we wanted to move away from a situation where people potentially would be fined or worse for not wearing them,” he said.
Donnelly also urged those who have yet to get their booster to do so as soon as they could.
He said: “As well as the masks the single most important thing we can do as a nation to take the pressure off the hospitals, off patients, and off healthcare workers is for those who are yet to be boosted to get it."
