People should “continue to do the right thing” and wear masks in shops, public transport and around vulnerable people, according to an infectious disease expert.
Dr Jack Lambert was speaking as the number of people in hospital with COVID jumped 60% over the last two weeks – hitting 907 on Friday morning.
It means there are now more patients with COVID in hospital than there was in late January.
Despite the rise however, the number in intensive care has remained steady, with 37 reported on Friday morning.
On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Dr Lambert said that, just because masks are no longer mandatory does not mean they are not needed.
“Whether it is mandatory or not, I think there should be a message, clearly, from our Government, that people should continue to do the right thing,” he said.
“I don’t want to go into a shop and cough on an elderly person and then they are going to end up sick in the hospital. They may not end up dying but they are ending up with serious morbidities.
“So, I just think we need to collectively continue to wear masks on public transportation, in shops and in all these kinds of places.
“That is gone by the wayside. I don’t think people seem to realise the contagiousness of this virus and the fact that it is serious for certain populations.”
COVID
Dr Lambert said COVID is no longer the threat it once was; however, it is still making people sick and affecting hospital capacity.
“The good news is this is a different virus,” he said. “Omicron is a different virus than Delta. The same number of people are not ending up in the ICU.
“You know, elderly people and people who are immunocompromised are still ending up in the hospital sick and they are requiring a few days in the hospital – but not weeks and weeks or months of hospitalisation like in the first few waves of the serious variants of COVID.”
"Serious virus"
He said he will continue to wear a mask in certain settings.
“I continue to use all the COVID prevention strategies,” he said. “The message I don’t think the Irish public are getting is, this is a serious virus – it is not a killer but it’s still a serious virus.
“The vaccines have helped make it less of a killer. People who are vaccinated are getting infected, but they are not ending up as sick as they would if they weren’t vaccinated – but they are still getting sick.
“It is still infecting people. The message is that we should be continuing to wear masks. We should be continuing to handwash. The COVID mitigation message have just gone totally from the public airspace – nobody is being told that.”
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