'Several hundred thousand new cases per week' - Stephen Donnelly on current Covid wave

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has said that Coronavirus cases in Ireland have reached several hundred thousand when speaking in an online meeting with Fianna Fáil party members on Monday night.

The Covid-19 infection figures have greatly increased over the last number of weeks and Donnelly voiced his concern by saying that while the daily number of PCR and antigen tests can reach 15,000 a day, the real number of cases is probably two or three times that.

The Health Minister has warned that serious new measures would be required to contain the latest highly transmissible BA.2 Covid-19 variant while Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan recommended that such restrictions are not needed at this time.

In the meeting with the Fianna Fáil members, Donnelly said: "The sub-variant that we’re dealing with now, the BA2 variant, is very, very contagious and the kind of measures you would need to radically reduce the spread would be really quite serious measures indeed."

He added: “We are most likely looking at several hundred thousand new Covid cases per week at the moment, which is a very high number."