Thread by @andrewflood

Ireland just had its highest every 24 hour number of New Hospital Cases at 225, the previous high was 209 on 21st January 2022. The government 'head in the sand' approach to the 'exit wave' has now put the health service under threat again & threatens the need for restrictions/1

The 1395 in hospital is 129% last Wednesday with average stay now at 9 days
1194 new hospital case this week is 108% previous
Donnelly has yet to create a new advisory committee & has no access to modelling so we are relying on his guesswork which is not confidence inspiring/2

We are basically praying that we have or are about to hit the infection peak and so in 7-10 days the rate of new hospital cases will start to reduce. Which *might* happen, proportion of cases going to hospital is falling & Denmark has seen a far in cases & hospital numbers/3

But while this reckless gamble might not result in the need for new restrictions (we are getting close though) it was entirely unnecessary. Probably even better messaging strongly encouraging masks on transport & retail would have flattened the curve enough to reduce this peak/4

If we get lucky we follow the pattern of Denmark this week with cases starting to quickly fall & then severe consequences (as shown by deaths here) falling in the weeks after. There is a reasonable chance of this but unlike Denmark we lack the testing data because that was cu

My wishful thinking bet is that the extended Paddys day weekend turns out to be the infection peak of the entire pandemic so cases peak next week & then decline in a similar fashion to Denmark - if that's not what happens restrictions to save healthcare seem inevitable /5

On the good news side, everything I'm hearing from GPs & hospital workers continues to be that post-vaccination covid is much less frequently very severe, hence the low proportion in ICU. But you can't really keep healthcare going with 20% of patients actively infectious /6

By analogy if we get away with this its a bit like accepting a lift home with someone who has just drank 8 pints. Getting away with it doesn't make it the right decision to have made when you could have caught the last bus by skipping that last drink /7

How much does about 50% of hospital admissions being primarily for other reasons affect this? A bit but pre-vaccine that figure was typically 30% so we'd still be almost at a peak plus its still the case that the 50% are potentially infectious & so resource demanding/8

There is also a good bit of uncertainty about the meaning of the statistic as from what I've heard some of that '50% incidental' are being primarily treated for other conditions but its probable that their Covid infection caused those conditions to 'flare up' /9

So while the higher incidental levels for hospital cases thanks to vaccination add context and must help they don't make the problem of very high numbers of cases go away. About 13% of in hospital patients being Covid positive is still a huge problem as we've been hearing /10