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Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has poured cold water on any immediate prospect of lifting lockdown restrictions on a county-by-county basis.
Mr Varadkar told the Dáil that “we’re not ready yet to treat different counties differently” because there was no county where the incidence of Covid-19 is currently low enough.
He also warned that the virus is now “more deadly” because it has mutated. Cases are stuck at around 500 or 600 a day, and unlikely to get below 100 due to the B117 variant, Mr Varadkar said.
As the Government waits for the outcome of the next meeting of the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) to inform its announcement on Tuesday on the easing of Level 5 restrictions, a number of TDs have appealed for those restrictions to be eased in counties with low incidences of Covid-19.
Independent TD Michael Collins said Co Cork had 14 cases and it was an opportunity with Holy Week approaching to open churches in counties with such a low incidence.
Mr Varadkar said “unfortunately there is no county at the moment where the incidence is low enough. Even where it’s low it’s still five or, 10, 20 times what it was last summer.”
He also told TDs that, while he was hopeful about the summer “the next couple of weeks are very worrying. The situation is deteriorating across Europe and appears to be deteriorating here as well.”
The Tánaiste warned that even with “enormous” effort by the public “getting down to very low figures like 10, 50 or even 100 [cases] a day is not a prospect in the way that it was last year because this virus has mutated. It is now much more transmissible and it is now more deadly, as we know, than the original wild strain”.
He told Social Democrats TD Róisín Shortall that, while more than one million vaccines are expected to be received by the end of the month, “they will not all be in people’s arms. It will probably be around 800,000, and another 1 million or so in April”.
Warning TDs that there had to be “honesty and realism” about the prognosis for what might happen after April 5th, he said “we are genuinely concerned about the possibility of a fourth wave before the summer before we have time to vaccinate those most at risk”.
The Government “will give as much clarity as we can, and as much hope as we can” on Tuesday. “But we will also need to be honest. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
The Tánaiste said “we’ll give people as much clarity as we can but we’ve seen on so many occasions that this virus rips up our plans and I don’t want to give people assurances for six weeks’ time that we then have to withdraw in three weeks’ time”.
Fine Gael TD Ciarán Cannon raised the issue of “risking profiling” and suggested it is time to move the parameters for lockdown “to something beyond R [reproduction] numbers and infection rates to reflect the fact that the risk associated, for example, with 500 cases last October and risk for 500 cases now is much more nuanced”.
Mr Varadkar told him, however, it was too early to change the risk profile. He said it would change because of the vaccine but only 10 per cent of people “have received a shot at this stage and it hasn’t changed the risk profile enough”.
He said “we’d really need to be up around 40 per cent, 50 per cent of people having received one vaccine before you’d see that having a meaningful impact on the R number and we’re not there yet”.
The Tánaiste told party colleague Jennifer Carroll MacNeill that at a European People’s Party meeting on Thursday, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was “confident that we’ll have between 300 million and 360 million doses in the second quarter of the year, April, May June – that’s over three million doses, more than a million a month coming to Ireland in the second quarter”.
He said the PCR testing had been extended on demand to five places, in Dublin and Tullamore, and “we’re also going to see greater use of antigen testing particularly in outbreaks and in workplaces”.