The HSE is seeing a 95 per cent reduction in the Covid-19 infection rate of hospital staff, the Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said on Tuesday.
Mr Donnelly also said the large majority of over 85s will have received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine by the end of this week.
The Minister told the Oireachtas Committee on Health there are some over 85s who are housebound and have not yet been vaccinated and "individual solutions" are being put in place.
Mr Donnelly said the latest figures he had showed the State had received 520,000 vaccines while the forecast is to have administered some 500,000 by the end of this week.
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Mr Donnelly said figures he had received from the HSE’s chief clinical officer indicated the impact the Covid-19 vaccine was having along with lower community transmission.
“From memory the chief clinical officer was citing figures that suggested about a 95 per cent reduction in Covid-19 infection rates for hospital staff which is very encouraging,” he said.
Mr Donnelly said Ireland has preordered just under 18.5 million vaccine doses and that if booster shots are required next winter or this time next year, "we would certainly have enough to do that" but an additional complication was variants.
There has been a “significant increase” in genome sequencing of positive Covid-19 tests, he said. The number has risen from 1 per cent of positive tests being genome sequenced to 15 per cent, and it is hoped this can increase further, he added.
In relation to when international travel might resume, the Minister said “to an extent Ireland and the rest of the world are to have to wait and see”.
He said the strategy right now is putting in place robust controls around such travel while aggressively suppressing the virus.
Outpatient waiting lists
Meanwhile, there are more than 622,000 people waiting for an outpatient appointment and 81,000 waiting on active inpatient/daycase lists, almost 22 per cent more than this time last year, Mr Donnelly told the Committee.
“Waiting lists for care in this country have been too long for years and this has been exacerbated by Covid,” he said.
The Wicklow TD said the scale of the challenge faced in terms of waiting lists coupled with Covid-19 is "completely unprecedented".
Fine Gael TD Colm Burke said there needed to be a comprehensive survey set up for when HSE staff leave and that it would help indicate what changes were needed to assist management.
“Over the last 12 months quite a number of staff have left but over the next 12 months it is going to be a bigger challenge,” he said.
Mr Donnelly said many HSE staff are exhausted and were “run off their feet” even before Covid-19 had arrived. He said “simply thanking people for their work is not enough” and they have to “look seriously at how fatigued people are, are people close to burnout”.
The Minister said his own view was that “we need to do something for them and in the fullest of time we will”.
Communications
He also said there had been a lot of commentary recently about the communications of Covid-19 and public health measures. “Some would argue that it [the commentary] was unfair, some of it is undoubtedly fair,” he said.
Mr Donnelly also said there was “no question” that richer countries are buying up the global stock of vaccines and at a meeting of EU health ministers on Monday he had called for “global justice on vaccinations”.
He said there was a moral obligation to help poor countries and that "there's no point in vaccinating ourselves or Europe or America vaccinating itself if large swathes of the world aren't vaccinated".
Mr Donnelly also said discussions are ongoing with representative bodies in relation to accepting the non-taxable Pandemic Placement Grant (PPG) of €100 per week for student nurses as recommended by an independent review from education expert Prof Tom Collins.
“They [representative bodies] were disinclined initially to accept Professor Collins’s proposal so there is an ongoing conversation with the department at the moment and I would very much like to get to an agreed position as quickly as possible,” he said.
In relation to the National Children’s Hospital, Mr Donnelly said the development board had “very successfully resisted a lot of claims from the contractor” and that “things were further complicated by Covid”.
“Obviously the site was shut down, then it was slow to get back up I have to say. I certainly was not satisfied about the speed with which it started back up again but it did start back up,” he said.
“Unfortunately because of Covid, there will be delays as there is to all major construction projects but certainly there is an independent mechanism in place where both the development board and the contractor go for these claims and of course they can always escalate I believe to the courts if they so need.”
The health committee resumes next Tuesday, when HSE chief executive Paul Reid will provide an update on public health measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
