HSE warns of major pressure on hospitals ahead of St Patrick’s Day

Hospitals and nursing homes are still facing major Covid-19 pressures, ahead of a busy St Patrick’s Day weekend.

Ireland lifted the vast majority of Covid-19 restrictions, including mandatory mask-wearing, at the end of February.

Over the course of the next few days, St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Ireland will return fully for the first time since the pandemic began.

Major events to mark the feast day of the country’s patron saint will take place over the coming long weekend, with Thursday and Friday designated bank holidays.

However while the celebrations will bring thousands of people onto the streets of Dublin and beyond, health officials on Wednesday warned that doctors and nurses are facing extraordinary challenges at Irish hospitals.

HSE chief Paul Reid has warned that Covid-19 has not gone away and urged people to follow public health advice, as new data points to a healthcare system coping with “extreme” demands.

He urged people to “get back to basics” on mask-wearing and to get vaccinated and boosted.

Covid-19, he said, is “still highly transmissible in our communities at the moment”.

“It is a double weekend for us, at a time when our system is under huge pressure,” HSE chief operations officer Anne O’Connor warned.

Officials stopped short of demanding that people mask up during the long weekend, but stressed that it would be a sensible measure to take.

“People make their own risk assessments,” HSE chief clinical officer Colm Henry said.

“Obviously, there are groups of people, those who are more vulnerable, those who are older, we’re certainly advising them to consider strongly wearing a mask in any setting where they may be more exposed to the virus, and there’s a lot of it out there at the moment.

“And certainly if you’re going to any setting where there’s that high degree of congestion, lots of people gathering together, maybe the wiser thing to do, to wear a mask than to not wear one.

“It’s not compulsory, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have to exercise judgment and wear one.”

The warnings come amid increasing concern about the situation in hospitals and emergency departments.

There are 1,082 patients with Covid-19 in Irish hospitals, an increase of more than 30% in a week and the highest figure this year so far.

Forty-four people are in ICU with the virus.

It comes as hospitals also tackle a spike in the people of people attending emergency departments.

Emergency departments saw 28,160 patients last week, a 31% increase compared with the same time last year.

Of them, nearly 7,000 patients were admitted into hospital.

“Admissions are running at quite a high level, with a high level of attendance,” Ms O’Connor said.

Mr Reid said that it was not his intention to cause “undue alarm”.

Instead, he stressed that it was important to be aware of the pressures the health system is under, with thousands of staff out and few beds unfilled.

In all, 4,102 HSE staff are out, while 940 staff are absent from nursing homes.

“As of this morning, we have 248 beds closed. We have 95 vacant beds this afternoon in our acute hospital system.

“Heading into a four-day bank holiday weekend – it is not a lot really and our sites this morning have been under a lot of pressure,” Ms O’Connor said.

Officials rejected any suggestion that the double bank holiday was, in retrospect, a mistake.

“The reality of Covid and predictability is something that we know we can’t bank on predictability and how you plan ahead for bank holiday weekends,” Mr Reid said.

“We are pleased that society has moved on, and we would have been supportive of that, obviously, because Covid is certainly less severe in terms of illness and that’s what we’re seeing both in hospital.

“The message from us today is a combination of the high transmissibility levels in the community now, along with the service demands, are putting the pressure on us.

“It was the same last weekend actually. It’s just our concern for this weekend is based on it being a bank holiday and more activity, and more presentations.”

Ms O’Connor said that it had been impossible to predict the extreme pressures hospitals would be under coming into the St Patrick’s Day long weekend.

“I’m not sure that we could have foreseen the level of activity that we have seen in the last couple of weeks really. It’s really quite extraordinarily high. And staying so high, coupled with very high Covid numbers,” she said.

Mr Henry confirmed that the BA.2 sub-lineage of the Omicron variant now makes up about 90% of all cases tested.

He also indicated that it was not entirely clear where the Covid-19 data goes from here, pointing to “large uncertainty”.

While there is a high degree of natural immunity built up, he said that re-infection remained possible – especially with the new sub-variant.

“People are thankfully mixing freely now and the restrictions were lifted in February 28. There are multiple opportunities for the virus to transmit out there in the community.

“However, there’s still levers we can pull, there still actions we can take and the choices we can make that can reduce transmission.”