DUBLIN (Reuters) – Irish health officials, where a more infectious variant of the coronavirus first discovered in England has increased, said on Saturday that they believe three cases of another new variant found in South Africa have been contained.
Ireland is battling a wave of COVID-19 that exceeded last year’s first wave. He confirmed the first cases of the most infectious variant found in South Africa on Friday in people who traveled from South Africa to Ireland during the Christmas holidays.
Ireland this week reported an increasing presence of the variant found for the first time in England. It was detected in 25% of positive cases that were subjected to new tests in the week until January 3, compared to just 9% two weeks earlier.
“The UK variant is of most concern to us purely because of the amount of virus that is on the island, and we know that it is being transmitted in the community,” Cillian De Gascun, head of Ireland’s national virus laboratory, told the national broadcaster TEN.
“The good thing about the South African variant is that we know exactly where these cases came from, they were contained, controlled and tracked by contact and, as far as I know, there was no further transmission.”
The government has announced its most stringent blocking measures since the beginning of last year on Wednesday, warning that a “tsunami” of infections fueled by the UK variant and the relaxation of restrictions before Christmas could overburden the health care system.
The number of patients in Irish hospitals with COVID-19 increased 12% in the space of 24 hours on Saturday to 1,285, having in recent days exceeded the peak of 881 established during the first wave of infections.
Fourteen more patients were admitted to intensive care units (ICU). This raised the total number of critical care patients to 119 and left only 27 of the 284 ICU beds in public hospitals in the country empty.
These hospitals can safely increase the ICU’s capacity to 375, said the head of the Ireland Health Service Executive (HSE) this week. HSE also reached an agreement to take ICU beds from private hospitals for COVID-19 hospitalizations.
Reporting by Padraic Halpin