What’s going on with Ireland?


A WaPo article from two days ago tells a particularly scary story – both for what it might mean for Ireland and what it might mean for the US. It starts out:

In the last weeks of 2020, Ireland had one of the lowest coronavirus cases per capita in the European Union. Today, it has the highest in the entire world.

While countries across Europe battle a third wave, in Ireland, the trajectory in recent weeks isn’t just an upward curve: It’s the path of a rocket ship.

Going into Christmas week, Ireland was reporting 10 new coronavirus cases each day per 100,000 residents — compared with about 66 cases per 100,000 residents in the United States. But three weeks later, Ireland is reporting more than 132 new cases per 100,000, according to the latest seven-day rolling average compiled by Johns Hopkins University, while the United States has risen less dramatically, to about 75 cases per 100,000.

Why did this happen? One reason seems to be that they made a big mistake in loosening up their restrictions for the Christmas holidays. But the other is probably that the new coronavirus variant from the UK seems to have hit them at the same time as they did this.

It sounds like Ireland has been as slow about doing sequencing – needed to identify Covid cases caused by the new variant – as we have. But the article says that a recent test of 92 samples from Covid patients in Ireland indicated almost half of them were infected by the new variant.

The most disturbing part of this story is that the US is still probably far behind Ireland in terms of being overrun by the new variant. But it’s known to be in a number of areas, so it’s probably inevitable at this point that the new variant will take off here, too. Hopefully, it won’t increase our cases per capital 13-fold in three weeks, as happened in Ireland.

But even if cases “just” double from the astronomical level they’re already at, we’re in for a lot of trouble – especially with hospitals already close to capacity, and beyond it in some places.

Note: The average deaths over the last seven days are over 3,400, and most days they’ve been over 4,000. This is the highest number of daily deaths in absolute terms so far (even the first wave never reached 3,000 deaths a day). It doesn’t look like this will go down anytime soon, but the big question is whether it will go up. At the moment, it’s hard to see why it won’t.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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