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The accelerated rollout of the vaccine programme to younger people will not “materially alter” what the country will be dealing with in terms of Covid-19 in July and August, deputy chief medical officer Dr Ronan Glynn has said.
Dr Glynn was speaking on Friday, following the announcement by the Health Service Executive (HSE) that pharmacies will offer the one-shot Janssen vaccine to people aged 18 to 34 from Monday, July 5th.
The online registration for mRNA vaccines vaccines will open for people aged 30 to 34 from next Friday.
“It may well alter what we have to deal with beyond [July and August], and obviously we will update our modelling, and more information will come out around transmissibility and severity of the Delta variant,” said Dr Glynn.
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“But we are where we are, we’ve got to deal with what is facing us, and I know it’s difficult for people to understand that something so significant could be coming when we’ve seen such a relative period of stability.”
Dr Glynn told RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland he had not been taken by surprise by figures presented earlier this week in Prof Philip Nolan’s model, which projected a severe impact of the Delta variant if fuelled by increased social mixing.
However, he acknowledged “it is hard to get your head around the scale of the numbers in some of these scenarios”.
He said: “If you look at the central case scenario, you’re talking about 900 cases a day which is not beyond the realms at all when you consider that in Scotland yesterday they reported over 4,000 cases, their highest number ever in the pandemic.
“There’s been various points over the past 18 months when we’ve seen modelling being presented to us, and it really takes you a few days to get your head around it and to believe that could actually transpire. But when you think about it we’re dealing with a virus that is up to twice as transmissible as what we were dealing with this time last year,” Dr Glynn said.
“While I fully accept that there’s very important parts of our economy that are still not properly open, vast parts of our society are open, and whilst the vaccination programme has gone very well in this country we still have over one in two adults in this country who are not adequately protected through vaccination.
“We have a new much more transmissible variant, we don’t have enough people fully vaccinated and we have very increased levels of social mixing and all of that unfortunately, if we’re not careful, could combine for a fourth wave that could see not alone Ireland but the whole of western Europe in significant difficulty over the next number of months.”
The question remained what size the fourth wave would be, he said.
Dr Glynn said although people have “relaxed” in recent weeks, he did not think that people had become unduly complacent. He said: “We all want this to be over, we all want to move on, we’re all tired and frustrated with having to listen to messages like the ones I’m giving this morning.
“That’s all very understandable, but I’m hopeful that – and including the announcement from the Minister on vaccination now being offered to younger people who would otherwise have been waiting for a number of weeks – they will see for themselves now that there is a path forward.”
When asked about the possible return of indoor dining, Dr Glynn said that given what European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and World Health Organisation were saying “we could not see indoor dining reopening in July or August; there was no point in us pretending that we could come back in three or four weeks time and that all would be well.
“We can see from our figures that the incidence is going to be higher in three or four weeks’ time. Much of Europe will be in a fourth wave of this disease in three or four weeks’ time,” Dr Glynn said.
Dr Cillian De Gascun, director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory, has said he would be more concerned about travel than indoor dining as the latter could be controlled.
“Travel is a greater risk to us,” he told RTÉ Radio’s Today with Claire Byrne show.
Although people who were vaccinated could travel safely, he said, the issue was the people with whom they would be mixing when they were away.
The position of the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) remained that non-essential travel should be avoided, he said, even though the Government had made a decision to proceed with the European digital travel cert and to allow travel from July 19th.
When asked about the possibility of a vaccination pass for indoor dining, Dr De Gascun said discussions had been ongoing about the possibility of such a pass for some time, but it had been hoped it would not be necessary to make a decision that would lead to discrimination.