Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

there was 118 positive tests in hospital yesterday so a proportion of them are surely incidental given the high community spread

Private hospitals may be needed if hospitalisations keep rising.

It appears now that the notion of closing anything is off the agenda. The public doesn't want that.

Delta spreads 50% faster than Alpha, which was 50% more contagious than the original strain. Omicron, according to some studies, spreads up to 70 times faster so it means it can get to more people more quickly and viruses tend not to survive all that well outside a host body.

Here's a Twitter thread with some thoughts on Omicron

It depends what incidental is defined as. If it’s the proportion of people who didn’t present to hospital as a confirmed positive and tested positive subsequently while in hospital, it’s 20-30% of hospital figures;

“Hospital-acquired infections occur in the latter part of each surge of disease, and in each of the three surges hospital-acquired Infections account for 20-30% of hospitalised cases.”

From government website from last January (need to scroll to page 42);

But those people could still become ill and need treatment.

The better figure to know would be those in hospital needing no treatment or so little treatment it has no bearing on their illness or length of stay.

@Octopod

Omicron is displacing delta science

ICU now at 93, up 6.

804 in hospital 93 ICU

It could be, and I'm not sure if it panned out that it was true, that he had one of those Lidl antigens (GENRUI) that were supposedly giving a lot of false positives? But if not, and still positive antigen, given that they say that some people are infectious for 10 days odd, going out with knowingly positive antigen rather than waiting another day or 2, seems a tad wrong.

HPSC are noting that the numbers reported today and yesterday are basically the positive swabs, not confirmed cases.

Still gonna reserve judgement till tomorrow, but ...

i see ConorRiocht has taken himself off twitter due to some absolutely tool bags on twitter trying to show who he is and where he works!! Oh and look who thinks he’s too positive miss caution olive! Herself and Paddy Cosgrave are a joke! Some serious gowls! God forbid anyone wants to be positive!!

What an embarrassing attack on him. He posted the HSE data, that's it. Insanity.

The mass isolations globally that will shut down huge amounts of manufacturing and services sites (including hospitals) is probably the biggest problem right now and a very difficult one. No easy or popular solution to that one I'm afraid.

Not sure what the ongoing value of mass PCR testing is given the lack of availability of timely tests.

The benefit of PCR confirmation at a point in time where the person is likely fully recovered seem to be entirely administrative, Covid sick pay, case counting, Digital Covid Cert, etc...

PCR is probably most useful in screening close contacts amongst healthcare staff, to ensure that healthy staff are not isolating unnecessarily and allowing the maximum availability of staff to meet all healthcare needs. Any surplus PCR capacity should be focussed on ensuring availability of staff for other essential state services.

To address the sick pay, apply the Covid sick pay in all instances of RTIs with or without PCR for the next month. Adding the cost saving of no PCR to regular sick pay will probably make up a large proportion of the difference.

Tracking cases can be done on the basis of self reporting of RTIs (will be needed for sick pay) and positive antigen with a random sample brought for PCR to determine the correlation between self reported RTI and PCR positive. Not as exact as the PCR for all regime we have had previously but certainly good enough to track macro trends and a whole lot better than just counting those who are lucky or persistent enough to book a PCR.

As for the Covid cert, there's a digital dustbin somewhere for that.