Irish COVID-19 outbreak driven by socialization, not new variant – officials

DUBLIN, Jan.2 (Reuters) – Increased socialization around Christmas – not a new variant of COVID-19 – led Ireland to go from the lowest infection rate in the European Union to the deterioration rate on faster, health officials said.

Prime Minister Micheál Martin said on Wednesday the highly contagious new variant discovered in neighboring Britain was spreading across Ireland at a rate that has exceeded the most pessimistic models available to the government.

Ireland’s top virologist Cillian De Gascun said on Friday evening that labs had found 16 instances of the variant from a sample of 169 positive cases.

Philip Nolan, head of the Irish COVID-19 modeling group, said on Saturday he believed the variant was between 5% and 17% of the current prevalence.

“Right now we think the UK variant is here at a relatively low level, even with this small sample,” Nolan told national broadcaster RTE.

“We saw an even more intense level of socialization and viral transmission over Christmas than we expected and this is what leads us to the truly precarious position we find ourselves in now.

Nolan said cases could peak between 3,000 and 6,000 per day and that Ireland was set to report more than 3,000 cases on Saturday, nearly double its daily record.

This will in part be due to a backlog of positive tests, but Nolan said the outbreak suggests that the number of people infected with someone infected with COVID-19 – the so-called reproduction number – may have increased by as much as 1.8 or 2.0.

The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 rose to 581 on Saturday from 508 a day earlier, and more than doubled in a week.

Infections are also spreading rapidly across the open border in the UK region of Northern Ireland. Cases per 100,000 people in the past seven days have jumped to 577 after health officials reported 3,576 more cases in the past 48 hours. (Report by Padraic Halpin, edited by Timothy Heritage)