Confirmed Covid cases in NI ‘doubling at a slower rate’

By Michael McHugh, PA

The number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in Northern Ireland doubled at a slower rate over the last seven days, official analysis said.

The 43 days the tally took to multiply is longer than the UK as a whole, at 33, and the Republic of Ireland at 13, Stormont’s Health Department said.

During the previous seven days before the latest, it required only 28 days for the total of infections to double in Northern Ireland.

It follows the imposition of tough lockdown measures after Christmas.

All non-essential retail and hospitality has been shuttered.

Stormont’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Ian Young, told the BBC’s Talkback programme: “The R number for cases, which is the earliest indicator, is definitely falling and has fallen significantly (from 1.8). And that reflects the impact of the restrictions.”

Doubling is monitored by comparing statistics from certain points and recording the rate at which the number of infections grew.

The goal is to drive the reproductive rate of the virus, the number each person with a positive test infects, below one.

That would eventually bring the outbreak under control and is closely linked to social mixing as well as transmissibility of the virus.

Scientists do not yet fully understand the impact of the new, more infectious, variant form of the virus circulating in Northern Ireland, Professor Young added.

He said: “So we’re clearly seeing that there is some compliance.

“We’re seeing that people are responding and that people are staying home compared with what happened earlier in December before the relaxation.

“But we also see that people are not behaving the way they did during the initial lockdown back in March and April and that’s really what we need at this time.

“We need that level of adherence to the stay at home message in order for the cases to drop rapidly and the pressures on hospitals to be reduced.”

Modelling suggests a further increase in hospital admissions on a daily basis, probably for at least the next seven days or so before that levels off.

The number of patients in hospital is unlikely to peak before sometime in the last two weeks in January, Professor Young added.

An additional 16 people have died from Covid-19 in Northern Ireland.

Another 759 tested positive, the Department of Health said on Monday.

The total of Covid-19 hospital admissions over the last seven days has risen to 488, compared with 425 the previous week, the Department of Health said.

The tally of inpatients at midnight was 736 compared with 722 seven days ago.

The Southern and Northern Health Trusts recorded the greatest numbers in hospital.

Daily admissions of confirmed cases are at around double what they were at the height of the pandemic peak last spring.

Covid intensive care units are 85% full.