Ireland has the highest Covid-19 rate in the world. How did it go so wrong?

When Ireland emerged from a strict six-week block in December, it had one of the lowest levels of Covid-19 cases in Europe. Since then, the situation has changed dramatically.

© Brian Lawless / AP
Paramedics and ambulances at Mater Hospital in Dublin

The country recorded the highest infection rate in the world last week, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication based at the University of Oxford.

In the seven days leading up to January 10, Ireland reported about 1,323 Covid-19 cases per million people, according to statistics, more than any other country in the same period.

On Friday, it recorded the biggest daily increase in infections since the start of the pandemic, with 8,248 new cases, according to a statement from the Irish health department.

“The alarming level of the disease is unprecedented in terms of our experience of Covid-19 levels in the community,” warned Professor Philip Nolan, a member of Ireland’s National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET). “We are seeing a number of cases per day, and numbers in hospitals, that we simply could not have understood before Christmas.”

© Artur Widak / NurPhoto / Getty Images
People walked down Grafton Street in central Dublin on January 6 after blocking measures were reimposed.

Irish medical experts, politicians and members of the public are now debating what went wrong.

The seasonality of the virus, the presence of the most transmissible variant in the UK and the families that mix during the holidays contributed to the increase, according to a spokesman for Prime Minister Micheál Martin’s office.

The increase is not “simplistic” and several factors have led to it, the spokesman told CNN on Tuesday.

“We saw an increase in socializations during the Christmas period and our public health experts said that the seasonality of the virus was a huge factor,” they said.

Ireland reopened the hospitality and other sectors with some restrictions on 4 December. Defending this decision, the spokesman said that the sectors involved “in general” adhered to public health measures and the incidence of infection was “relatively low” in hospitality, retail and construction settings.

The UK’s most contagious variant, first discovered in Ireland on Christmas Day, “had a very significant impact [on] the growth of cases because it is believed to be between 50% and 70% more transmissible ”, added the spokesman.

About 40% of Covid-19’s most recent positive cases in Ireland are caused by the UK’s most contagious variant, said Cillian De Gascun, director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory, in a statement on Monday.

As of December 18, Irish families were allowed to mix with up to two others, despite other European countries canceling Christmas parties.

More than 54,000 people flew to the Republic of Ireland between December 21 and January 3, according to the Department of Justice.

“There was no properly administered isolation system,” Gabriel Scally, president of epidemiology and public health at the Royal Society of Medicine, told CNN by phone on Tuesday. “Ireland and Britain are unsuccessful islands in terms of Covid, when you look at the others. There was an understandable desire for normalcy at Christmas after a difficult year; but the virus doesn’t know that.”

Ireland closed restaurants, pubs serving food and some shops on Christmas Eve and has since tightened its blocking measures even further – including the closure of non-essential construction sites, schools and daycare services.

There are currently 1,582 Covid-19 patients hospitalized in Ireland, 146 of whom are in intensive care, just before the spring peak of 155, according to the health department.

“We know that hospitalizations occur a few weeks after a confirmed case is reported, and mortality after that again,” said Ireland’s chief physician, Tony Holohan, in a statement on Monday. “This means that, unfortunately, we are determined for a period of time when the situation in our hospitals gets worse before it gets better.”

Ireland has only five intensive care beds per 100,000 people, well below the OECD average of 22, according to OECD data.

So far, the country has reported a total of more than 152,000 cases of Covid-19 and 2,352 deaths, according to a Johns Hopkins University count.

As for the recent increase, the tools to deal with “this accelerated growth rate” are in the hands of Ireland, according to Nolan, who chairs the NPHET Irish Epidemiological Modeling Advisory Group.

He added that he hopes the current measures “will significantly suppress the transmission of the virus”.