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Modelling scenarios for the impact of the Omicron Covid-19 variant show up to 1,500 people requiring general hospital care, with more than 400 people requiring critical care, and more than 2,000 people in hospital at peak.
That is according to Professor Philip Nolan of Maynooth University who on Saturday published a number of modelling scenarios emphasising the need for people to take extra care, get vaccinated and reduce social contact.
Prof Nolan said the prospect of 2,000 people requiring hospital care was one of the more “pessimistic modelling scenarios” but the level of reduction in social contact people put in place over the next three weeks would be “key” to how the population fares in the oncoming, fifth wave of Covid -19.
Prof Nolan said the number of variables in the modelling was large but based on vaccines remaining effective in preventing people getting seriously ill. However should vaccine effectiveness “is even moderately reduced” the State “will see more severe cases than in our model scenarios,” making treating people extremely difficult.
Prof Nolan’s comments come as the general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation Phil Ni Sheaghdha said the publication of daily figures for the dead and the seriously ill in ICU should be resumed.
Ms Ni Sheaghdha said health care workers were not confident that the truth about what is happening in hospitals and the current state of the health service was “getting out there” .
She said health care workers were “very worried about the seriousness of what is facing them” and debate about pubs closing at 5pm or 8 pm was very hard to listen to when you had just been telling a patient’s family “over the phone because they can not visit” that the patient is not going to make it.
Ms Ni Sheaghdha, called on the health authorities to resume publication of daily numbers of those who have died, along with numbers in hospitals and in intensive care, as she said “if you don’t see it, you do not believe it is happening”.
She said health workers had asked her to give some examples of what they experience on a daily basis and these included a report from a nurse that “she was standing with a patient who was very breathless, in his 30s, not vaccinated, struggling for breath and saying ‘I made the wrong decision’. He did not make it,” Ms Ni Sheaghdha said.
“The numbers of people who are not vaccinated and are having very very poor outcomes are simply incredible at the moment.
She said: “Our messaging about the vaccination while very good, has to really ramp up. We have to look at areas, we have to look at what messaging people are not vaccinated - what messages people are listening to, and we need in the opinion of this nurse, we need to go back to telling people the numbers of people who are dying on a daily basis.”
She said nurses and midwifery professions “have faced the onslaught of Covid with the mentality of, we will go to work we will do our best and we will give as much as we can.
“But when we say they are exhausted and when we say they are themselves unable to keep going, that is the time for the decision makers and the politicians to not try and be popular make the hard decisions to keep the workforce in place”
Ms Ni Sheaghdha, speaking on RTE Radio said the public hospital system “doesn’t have the capacity” to deal with the onslaught, but “we are still arguing about private hospitals coming on the pitch”. She said a nurse manager had told her she had made at least four phone calls to private hospitals to take patients and the private hospitals had refused.
Ms Ni Sheaghdha said hospital workers were “incredulous” that there was a debate about 5pm or 8pm hospitality closing.