Record deaths but vaccines will lower rate

While the numbers in terms of daily Covid cases are going in the right direction, the health service is still in the midst of a huge struggle to save lives.

This week saw the highest number of deaths announced on any one night when 101 coronavirus-related deaths and 879 new cases were revealed on Tuesday night. 83 of the deaths occurred in January with 18 taking place this month.

But hope is coming - the news on vaccines is very positive. Speaking on Newstalk this week, the Chair of the High-Level Task Force on Covid-19 Vaccination, Professor Brian MacCraith, gave some detail on how the vaccine rollout will go.

Although he did say that he didn’t think it was wise to make predictions, what he said was promising.

Last week it was reported that we are due to get around 1.4m doses of vaccine into Ireland by the end of quarter one, a figure that may change. Prof MacCraith said that people are suggesting that this would mean 700,000 people would be vaccinated by the end of quarter one, but this is unlikely to be the case.

He cited that some of the vaccine would probably only be arriving into Ireland in the last week of Q1 and some doses always have to be held back to ensure that people who have been vaccinated would get their second dose. He ran one model to see what would be most likely. “If we had 1.4m vaccines, in one particular model we would have 530,000 people getting two doses and about 190,000 people getting a single dose. “75,000 people in long-term residential care homes - staff and residents would be vaccinated, 150,000 frontline healthcare workers fully vaccinated and over 300,000 over 70s fully vaccinated and another almost 200,000 over 70s who have received the first dose.

“That’s not a prediction, that’s a scenario for a particular set of condition that will probably change,” he added. He said that it looks like Q2 will be the big quarter. By the end of June he said we could be looking at up to a million or more doses coming in monthly which could mean around 250,000 vaccine doses a week being administered. He said that the over 85s are the next group to get vaccines and they will receive a communication from their GPs. This will start in the next two weeks.

Professor Luke O’Neill spoke this week about how effective vaccines are at protecting people from hospitalisation and decreasing the possibility of long Covid.

Johnson & Johnson released data from the trial of their one-shot vaccine on Friday and Professor O’Neill described the findings as “remarkable” - 72 per cent efficacy in the US population. Last week Novavox announced a vaccine efficacy of 89.3 per cent with efficacy against both the UK and South Africa variants.In the UK, they have vaccinated around 80 per cent of the over 80s already. They are ahead of us, but soon the death rate should start to fall substantially and in a few months, it should go down dramatically.

That time can’t come quickly enough.