Officials have said hey are ‘hopeful’, but it is not guaranteed.
Image: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie Image: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie IF ALL GOES to plan, the government will begin to ease Covid-19 restrictions from next Monday, 18 May.
When the government published its roadmap for easing restrictions, it laid out a number of “trigger criteria” to be reviewed before moving into each of the five phases in the plan.Disease progression Readers will be familiar with the daily updates provided by the CMO each evening on the numbers of new confirmed cases of Covid-19 and also the numbers of patients diagnosed with the disease who have died.
The reproduction number – the number of people infected by a positive case – has also consistently fallen in the last number of weeks. Keeping this number below one is paramount and currently it is between 0.31-0.71. If this number starts to creep up above that level, or the rate of hospitalisation starts to increase, lifting restrictions would be less likely. However Dr Holohan has said, for now, this trend is “moving in the right direction”.
A number of weeks ago officials committed to reaching a capacity to test 15,000 people a day. At the weekend, the HSE said the healthcare service has reached this target. Last week, Dr Cillian de Gascun, director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory at UCD said the HSE has a team looking into individual cases where a person has been waiting longer than the average.
He said hospitals operate on different computer systems so they “don’t all talk to each other very easily”. But as we move through the phases, if NPHET believes there is widespread infection in any sector involving the care of vulnerable groups, this will play a part in its advice to the Department of Health.
Figures from the HSE show that the number of suspected cancer cases being referred for investigation by GPs through the HealthLink referral system has dropped by more than half.
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