The world will never go back to the way it was before the coronavirus pandemic, according to the World Health Organisation.

In Ireland, the number of COVID-19 patients in hospital is continuing to fall.

There were 472 people in Irish hospital with the virus last night and 110 people in intensive care with their symptoms.

Meanwhile, the 14-day incidence of the virus has fallen below 200 for the first time since Christmas.

   

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, WHO spokesperson Dr Margaret Harris said Ireland needs to keep working to bring down the figures further.

“You are bringing them down well so that says that society is working very, very hard to beat this,” she said.

“Even though the vaccine is now having an impact on deaths in the countries that have done it, it is not necessarily stopping the transmission so that work has to keep on going and the figures in Ireland suggest indeed that you as a society are doing the work to keep on bringing the numbers down.”

"Difficult point"

Dr Harris said the world is now “at a difficult point” with the virus – after the number of new cases globally increased for the first time in seven weeks.

“We did see, for the last six weeks, the numbers coming down but for the first time in seven weeks the numbers have begun to rise,” she said.

“The good news is that the number of new deaths is continuing to fall but they are not coming down as quickly.

“This is telling us that we are certainly no way out of the woods. We have to keep working not only to roll out the vaccines to every country but we all have to keep doing the measures we know stop transmission so it is not an easy time.”

Change

She said the world is unlikely to go back to the way it was before the pandemic.

“Every big health event; every big disease that has gone through the human population has changed the way we are,” she said.

“But I think we are also better than we were in terms of science; in terms of communication and we can do better.

“We kind of relaxed for too long thinking, ‘oh, health is not an issue’ but now we do need to understand that health is central to everything else and we can do a lot better but I do think it is going to be a better world.”

"Better normal"

She said she hopes the world can look forward to a “better normal.”

“What I would like to see is life applying the lessons we have learned and going back to a better normal,” she said.

“The old normal was not good enough; that led us into this situation.

“So, things like looking at how can you improve ventilation. You know, Ireland is not a warm country and Irish people, like people everywhere, like to gather together so how can you do that safely so that, not only this virus but the next respiratory virus that comes along, won’t have such a great opportunity to jump through us.

“But also, indeed, we are going to be battling the variants because the virus has been in our populations around the world for so long that it has had plenty of opportunity to find ways to try to stay with us.”

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