Cork professor urges mask wearing and step up in other measures to control spread of new covid variant

A University College Cork (UCC) professor who is a member of a group that advises the Health Minister on covid has expressed fears that Government measures aren’t going far enough to address a surge in cases.

Professor of physical chemistry, John Wenger, is among members of the Covid-19 Advisory Group, which also includes other Cork experts — the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland president, Prof Mary Horgan, and senior lecturer in biochemistry, Dr Anne Moore.

Prof Wenger’s concerns relate to the spread of a new covid variant known as Eris, and a number of PCR-confirmed cases recorded over the last two weeks.

He has advocated the wearing of masks, particularly the high-quality respiratory masks.

There have been 66 PCR-confirmed cases of covid in Cork over the past 14 days up to and including Monday, August 7. This contrasts with 216 in Dublin, 93 in Limerick, and 97 in Kerry in the same period.

Prof Wenger referred to oversights in the Government’s previous winter plan.

“Many of the things that I would like to have seen introduced were not,” he said.

“There was a winter plan... which included improved measures on ventilation and air filtration but little was implemented.”

“My concern is that the effort just wasn’t put into improving ventilation and air filtration in places like hospitals and nursing homes which should be our focus,” said Prof Wenger.

“I still think that’s relevant today. This is difficult and sometimes expensive to do but we are talking about people’s health. It’s important that we do the right thing and invest and make sure that places are safe, not only for patients, but for staff too. If healthcare staff become sick we could find ourselves in an even worse situation.”

He said he hopes this year can be different.

“As regards the group and its recommendations, some of these were implemented but others weren’t. This is also about implementing change and recommendations and I don’t think that was done last Christmas. I sincerely hope this year is different.”

He described the recent covid surge as unsurprising.

“I’m not surprised really, because the virus is constantly evolving and there are new variants which are both highly infectious and escaping the protection of vaccines or previous infections. We are always going to have new variants. Until we get a vaccine that can block transmission we are going to keep on playing this game and that is the real problem.”

WEATHER

The Cork man said that much of the spread could be down to the recent weather.

“The weather has been so poor recently that people are spending more time indoors doing other things. A lot of people are visiting the cinema to see films like Oppenheimer which means they are socialising in crowds.”

He is calling for the reintroduction of some protective measures to contain the spread.

“I think this is especially important now as we approach the start of the school year. It’s vital that we step up measures to prevent and control the spread of the virus. These measures include the wearing of masks, particularly the high-quality respiratory masks associated with healthcare settings.”

Fresh reminders are now being issued to the public concerning covid-19 safety measures.

A spokesperson for the HSE recently told The Echo that the new variant is “more transmissible than previous circulating variants”.

“There is currently no evidence of increased clinical severity of infection, but people are still advised to follow covid-19 prevention measures,” they added.

The spokesperson said there have been waves of increased covid-19 activity every few months since the start of 2022 but that, to date, waves during the summer period “have generally been of lower magnitude than those in the winter period”.

“The number of patients in ICU that had covid-19 infection did increase slightly during July, but remains overall low.”