Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has said the increase in the number of Covid cases in Ireland is cause for concern.
The minister urged those who are over 65 and are yet to receive their second booster jab to do so.
He said: “If I had one message, it’s to ask those, particularly those over 65 and those who are immunosuppressed that haven’t yet got the second booster to do so.
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“The figures are quite stark in terms of how important it is for people to get their booster. The latest advice I have is of those 600 or so patients with Covid within hospitals, more than 7 in every 10 of them are over 65 years of age, but worryingly quite a bit less than half of over 65 have got the second booster.
“Now obviously we would be very concerned for any patient who is hospital with Covid for themselves in the first instance, but also there’s more chance of Covid outbreaks now that can affect our health care workers.
“They get Covid. They have to come out as well, and critically we have got to protect the hospital services for scheduled care.
“We all know there’s a lot of work going on to bring the waiting lists down, but for that to work, we have to have the beds. We have to have the operating theatres. We have to have the community beds to be able to discharge people too.”
Asked if restrictions would be introduced if cases continue to rise, Minister Donnelly said he would not be able to rule out the need for measures in the future.
He said: “There’s no public advice whatsoever on any mandatory approaches, and in fact, we are not right now in that phase. We are in a phase that is around living with Covid, managing Covid.
“Of course, we don’t know what advice we will get in the future. It is possible that those advices will change in this current wave, but we have no advice to that effect at this time.
“However, it is important to say that the public health advice is still to wear masks on public transport, for example.”
Speaking on whether a peak in the current wave of infection has been reached, Minister Donnelly said: “It’s very difficult to tell just how high this is going to go and how fast.
“What we know is that the previous wave we saw in February and March, we ended up with a little over 1600 Covid patients, and the problem is the HSE had to cancel a huge amount of planned operations, planned procedures planned treatment. So certainly, if we start seeing the numbers going into the say 12, 13, 1400 range, again despite of the fact that a lot of extra capacity has been added, it may well be that the HSE or at least in some hospitals would be put in a position to cancel procedures.”
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