Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

It depends what incidental is defined as. If it’s the proportion of people who didn’t present to hospital as a confirmed positive and tested positive subsequently while in hospital, it’s 20-30% of hospital figures;

“Hospital-acquired infections occur in the latter part of each surge of disease, and in each of the three surges hospital-acquired Infections account for 20-30% of hospitalised cases.”

From government website from last January (need to scroll to page 42);

But those people could still become ill and need treatment.

The better figure to know would be those in hospital needing no treatment or so little treatment it has no bearing on their illness or length of stay.

@Octopod

Omicron is displacing delta science

ICU now at 93, up 6.

804 in hospital 93 ICU

HPSC are noting that the numbers reported today and yesterday are basically the positive swabs, not confirmed cases.

Still gonna reserve judgement till tomorrow, but ...

i see ConorRiocht has taken himself off twitter due to some absolutely tool bags on twitter trying to show who he is and where he works!! Oh and look who thinks he’s too positive miss caution olive! Herself and Paddy Cosgrave are a joke! Some serious gowls! God forbid anyone wants to be positive!!

What an embarrassing attack on him. He posted the HSE data, that's it. Insanity.

The mass isolations globally that will shut down huge amounts of manufacturing and services sites (including hospitals) is probably the biggest problem right now and a very difficult one. No easy or popular solution to that one I'm afraid.

Not sure what the ongoing value of mass PCR testing is given the lack of availability of timely tests.

The benefit of PCR confirmation at a point in time where the person is likely fully recovered seem to be entirely administrative, Covid sick pay, case counting, Digital Covid Cert, etc...

PCR is probably most useful in screening close contacts amongst healthcare staff, to ensure that healthy staff are not isolating unnecessarily and allowing the maximum availability of staff to meet all healthcare needs. Any surplus PCR capacity should be focussed on ensuring availability of staff for other essential state services.

To address the sick pay, apply the Covid sick pay in all instances of RTIs with or without PCR for the next month. Adding the cost saving of no PCR to regular sick pay will probably make up a large proportion of the difference.

Tracking cases can be done on the basis of self reporting of RTIs (will be needed for sick pay) and positive antigen with a random sample brought for PCR to determine the correlation between self reported RTI and PCR positive. Not as exact as the PCR for all regime we have had previously but certainly good enough to track macro trends and a whole lot better than just counting those who are lucky or persistent enough to book a PCR.

As for the Covid cert, there's a digital dustbin somewhere for that.

As someone has pointed out, a clarifying note that England are bringing the COVID-pass in at local level recently for the first time having only used them for international travel before that.

But that is exactly what hospitals are doing, managing infections by testing patients and segregating them.

What im talking about is if things get so bad in the future is maybe having an acceptance of their being infection throughout the hospital and then trying to protect the most vulnerable patients in hospital and putting the resources into that. I dont think we are anywhere near that point yet though.

A family member from the US has tested positive on a pre flight antigen test to return to where they live in the US so a bit of a sour end to an otherwise alright Christmas

The interesting metric to look at is what the overall increase in hospital capacity was, if a hospital has been at 200 patients all month and then that jumps to 300 (with say, 150 COVID patients) that would imply that there are 100 excess patients being admitted above normal which are probably "for COVID" related.

Similar with London, there was about 2000 patients over Christmas and that jumped to 3000, if the normal post Christmas jump is 10%, then 800 are likely to be excess and COVID related (and Christmas and holidays may be masking a lot of the true figures anyway, meaning it'll be January before accurate readings are given).

Just cop on. You can disagree with Holohan but to accuse him of lying is reprehensible. I'd be as certain as I can be that he presents data in a professional manner. In the UK they have given their CMO a knighthood. Just saying!