Ireland 'in the dark' on extent of current Covid wave, says Westmeath virologist

A leading virologist from Westmeath said the dismantling of the HSE's mass testing system means Ireland doesn't have any accurate indicator of how many people are contracting Covid-19 during the current wave of the virus.

Dr Gerald Barry, who lectures in the School of Veterinary Medicine at UCD, also said he expects people of all ages to be offered a booster vaccine this autumn in anticipation of a large spike in infections towards the end of the year.

Gerald, who grew up in Athlone, spoke about the summer Covid surge on The Irish Times' In The News podcast earlier this week.

He said the transmissibility of the virus, and the arrival of new variants, meant Covid-19 was continuing to spread but there was no solid data on its current prevalence across the population.

"We don't have any accurate handle on how many infections are happening currently and that's a shame for a number of reasons," he said.

"Being able to track waves of infection is useful for planning in hospitals and the health system, but also, from a sequencing point of view, it's very useful to be able to track people that are infected because it allows you to track new variants that might be emerging.

"At the moment we're completely blind to that and we're reliant on other countries to act as an early warning system for us."

He felt a reintroduction of widespread PCR testing was unlikely to happen for economic and political reasons.

"I am also not sure if, currently, based on the general feeling in the population, there would be an appetite to go and get tested with PCR testing on a mass scale, the way we used to do it."

He said in many cases the protection Covid-19 vaccines provided against infection tended to decrease dramatically - to "close to zero" - around three months after receiving a jab, but that the vaccines remained hugely important in reducing the severity of the illness.

While the roll-out of the second Covid booster vaccine has so far focused on those who are over 65 or immuno-compromised, Gerald predicted it was "very likely" everyone would be offered a booster this autumn in anticipation of a large wave of infection in the lead up to Christmas.

He said the trials carried out when the current Covid vaccines were in development focused on preventing people from becoming very sick rather than on stopping them from getting infected.

"The trials were always about protecting people against severe disease, and the vaccines have done an amazing job at that.

"Now the next level is, can we actually develop a vaccine that will neutralise the virus as soon as it comes into the nose, so that you don't even notice it's come into your nose because it gets neutralised so quickly?"

Looking ahead, he said waves of the virus would continue to occur and he would like to see the introduction of a colour-coded warning system which would let people know how prevalent the disease was at any given time.

He said this would allow individuals make an informed choice about taking precautions such as wearing a mask and avoiding crowds at times when the virus was circulating more widely.

"I would be an advocate for some sort of risk rating system, a bit like we have for the weather forecast, whereby we can see a wave coming, (and when) we're roughly four weeks out from it we move into kind of an 'orange period' where your risk of infection is increasing.

"(At that stage) if you have a major event coming up, such as a wedding, you might want to consider changing your behaviour. You might want to consider wearing a mask in crowded areas. You might want to consider doing more antigen tests, so that you reduce your risk of disrupting whatever that major social event might be."

Looking ahead to where the pandemic might be going in the longer-term, Gerald said there were some causes for optimism, such as work being undertaken on new generations of vaccines, and the roll-out of antiviral treatments for virus.

However, he was wary about the possible long-term impacts of multiple waves of infection spreading through the population.

"More and more evidence is building to say that infection with this thing has the potential to cause a long-term impact on people's health," he pointed out.

"While I'm optimistic in some senses, I'm also a little bit concerned about the fact that these multiple waves of infection are being judged in Ireland based on whether they have the potential to collapse our health system or not.

"It appears, from the outside looking in, that as long as our health system is not going to collapse then we're okay to have a wave of infection, which is kind of like what's happening in the country at the moment.

"We're not responding aggressively to it. We're not really thinking about it too much on a kind of a Government level, or Department of Health level, at least publicly.

"There seems to be an acceptance that, yes, we're going to have waves of infection and lots and lots of people are going to get infected but it's okay because most of them won't end up in hospital.

"I would look at it a little bit differently and say it's probably not a great thing to accept the fact that our population is going to be repeatedly infected, potentially a number of times each year... I would have concerns about what that is that going to do to the general health of the population.

"It's not a good thing for our population to be infected regularly by something that really we don't know the long-term impact of," he said.