Ireland has introduced travel restrictions to and from seven Southern African countries after the emergence of highly transmissible variant of concern, recently named Omicron. Legislation will be brought through the Dail early next week which will allow the re-introduction of mandatory hotel quarantining as part of measures to stop the spread of the new variant. Earlier, the president of European Commission Ursula von der Leyen had said that, restrictions on travel would be discussed with the member states. Following this, many EU countries have announced travel restrictions from these designated African states.
Under new measures, those returning to Ireland from Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe will have to get a PCR test regardless of vaccine status before entering the country. After arrival, a mandatory quarantine for 10 days is necessary.
Meanwhile the Department of Health has confirmed 4,791 new cases of Covid-19 in Ireland today. At 8am on Saturday morning, there were 536 people in hospital with the virus, down 36 on Friday’s figures.
Amid the concerns the WHO has said, though Omricon is classified as variant of concern, there are no evidences that it can cause severe illness than the previous variants. It may take several weeks to find out the scale of infection caused by Omricon.
However Omricon has had a number of mutations and believed to spread quickly. It is also believed that the variant can also affect people who had been tested positive earlier.
The reports from South Africa say that a recent surge in Covid patients is suspected to be due to Omricon variant. But many patients have not showed any common symptom that Covid patients usually have. It leads to the conclusion that the Omricon variant may not be able to cause severe illness than the other variants.
Omricon has also been detected in Belgium. It is the first case of the variant in Europe.