The country recorded the highest infection rate in the world last week, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication based at Oxford University.
In the seven days leading up to January 10, Ireland reported about 1,323 cases of Covid-19 per million people, statistics showed, more than any other country in the same period.
On Friday, it recorded the highest daily increase in infections since the beginning of the pandemic, with 8,248 new cases, according to a statement from the Irish health department.
“The alarming level of the disease is unprecedented in our experience of Covid-19 levels in the community,” said Professor Philip Nolan, a member of Ireland’s National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET). “We see a number of cases a day and a number in the hospital, which we simply could not have understood before Christmas.”
Medical experts, politicians and members of the public in Ireland are now all talking about what went wrong.
The seasonality of the virus, the presence of the more transmissible variant in the UK and the households that mix during the holidays have contributed to the increase, according to a spokesman for the office of Prime Minister Micheál Martin.
The increase is not “simplistic” and there were a number of factors that led to it, a spokesman for CNN said on Tuesday.
“We have had an increase in socialization over Christmas and our public health experts have said that the seasonality of the virus is a huge factor,” they said.
Ireland reopened hospitality and other sectors with some restrictions on 4 December. Defending this decision, the spokesman said that the sectors involved “in general” adhered to public health measures, and the incidence of the infection was “relatively low” in the hospitality, retail and construction settings sectors.
The more contagious variant of the United Kingdom, first discovered in Ireland on Christmas Day, “had a very significant impact [on] increasing cases because it is believed to be 50% and 70% more transmissible, “the spokesman added.
More than 54,000 people flew to the Republic of Ireland between December 21 and January 3, according to the Justice Department.
“There was no properly managed isolation system,” the president of epidemiology and public health at the Royal Society of Medicine, Gabriel Scally, told CNN on Tuesday. “Ireland and Britain are unsuccessful islands in Covid terms when you look at others. There was an understandable desire for normal Christmas after a hard year; but the virus doesn’t know that.”
Ireland has closed restaurants, pubs and some shops on Christmas Eve and has since tightened lock-in measures – including the closure of non-essential construction sites, schools and childcare services.
There are currently 1,582 Covid-19 patients hospitalized in Ireland, of whom 146 are in intensive care, shortly after the spring peak of 155, according to the health department.
“We know that hospitalizations take place a few weeks after a confirmed case is reported, and mortality after that again,” Ireland’s chief medical officer, Tony Holohan, said on Monday. “This means that, unfortunately, we are prepared for a period of time when the situation in our hospitals worsens before it improves.”
To date, the country has reported a total of more than 152,000 Covid-19 cases and 2,352 deaths, according to a report by Johns Hopkins University.
With regard to recent growth, the tools to address “this accelerated growth rate” are in the hands of Ireland, according to Nolan, who chairs the NPHET’s Irish epidemiological modeling advisory group.
He added that he hoped that the current measures would “significantly suppress the transmission of the virus”.
Kara Fox, Ivana Kottasová, Niamh Kennedy and Blathnaid Healy contributed to this report