A CORK consultant in infectious disease has welcomed the “disjoint between hospitalisations and Covid-19” amid a reduction in the spread of the virus.

Consultant in infectious diseases at Cork University Hospital (CUH) and Mercy University Hospital (MUH) Dr Arthur Jackson said that while there is no question that the virus “is still circulating”, the spread of the infection is a lot lower this week than four weeks ago.

“The disjoint between hospitalisations and Covid-19 is to be welcomed hugely because back last January and February was really hellish working in the hospital sector.

“When I say hellish, it was scary and hard and intense and lots of people were critically ill and everything was disrupted so the hospital service couldn’t have continued like that.

“That was when there was a huge association with getting Covid and being hospitalised with Covid, now that association is far far lower and there are no questions about that at ground level.

“Even the on-calls these days are often having on-calls without a single Covid patient being identified and, since the last four or five months most of the patients identified with Covid in the hospital, it’s been an incidental finding - they come in with appendicitis and they have Covid as well or they come in with something else,” he said.

Speaking about the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron, he said that while it is more infectious, the vaccinated population usually present with a mild illness and said while the virus may recrudesce again, that there has been a good response to vaccination.

“So, is it going to get worse? Maybe. I don’t know. Is it going to recrudesce again as we go into autumn and we get another wave as immunity drops? Maybe, it all depends. We’ve had such good responses to vaccination,” he said.

As of mid-May 2022, there have been a total of 1,551,835 cases of Covid-19 in Ireland.

Of those, 7,244 resulted in death.