A top scientist dismissed claims that Ireland would reach 10,000 daily cases of Covid-19 by Christmas - because we would take decisive action before ever reaching that point.
And regional lockdowns are the way forward - and could help much of Ireland join the 1billion people around the world already living in Covid-free areas, according to Dr Tomas Ryan from Trinity College Dublin.
Speaking exclusively to the Irish Mirror on Sunday, another expert, Prof Gerry Killeen, from UCC, sent out a stark warning that cases could skyrocket by December.
Prof Killeen said: “Our cases are 10 times higher than they were two months ago.
“If you take that trajectory forward without any changes, that’s 1,000 cases a day in two months from now and 10,000 a day by Christmas.”
But Dr Ryan said that the country would take action before the situation came to 10,000 cases per day.
Dr Ryan, from the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity, told RTE Radio 1’s Brendan O’Connor show: “Dr Gerry Killeen has a very stark way of presenting things. But he only deals in facts.
“We’re not going to keep going like this, we can’t keep going like this.
“I don’t think we’re going to get to 10,000 cases a day at Christmas or anything near it, because we will take action before then.
“But the question is, what does that action look like?”
Dr Ryan said regional lockdowns have helped get the virus down in other countries and could be the way forward for Ireland.
He said: “Local lockdowns have been a success. No one wants to experience them but they work, and regional restrictions are more ideal than national restrictions.
“Regional approaches are the way to go, because we’ve seen in other countries - even countries when they were flattening their curve back in march and April - the countries that did it on a regional basis actually flattened their curve much more quickly than the countries that did it on a national basis.
“And now we know that we can do this in Ireland. This is a really positive development in the story of our experience of the pandemic.”
In this way, Ireland can join the 1billion other people around the world living in Covid-free regions.
Dr Ryan said: “If you look at the globe, if you look at the population on Earth right now, over 1billion are currently living in a zero-Covid situation.
“There may be only 4million people in New Zealand, but 1 billion people, if you put together China, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Iceland - none of these countries have a zero-Covid situation all the time, but most of those countries most of the time can have that.
“So if you have a goal of what a zero-Covid situation would look like, and you have the reward there, then local communities can work together to achieve that.”
