A spike in Covid-19 infections has been recorded in Greece over the festive season with experts warning that the peak of the current outbreak will be the end of January.
On January 1st, the National Organization for Public Health (EODY) said it had recorded 229 new admissions of patients with coronavirus in hospitals in the past twenty-four hours, of which 64 were in Athens.
Testing on raw sewage in Athens shows a steep spike in Covid-19 infections, an expert said on Tuesday.
“The reality is that in the last month, we have had a very large increase in the general load in the wastewater of both the coronavirus and other respiratory viruses such as influenza A and syncytial virus (RSV),” said Nikos Thomaidis, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in an interview with state-run broadcaster ERT on Tuesday.
“The viral load of the coronavirus is much, much higher than that of the other two, but having the other two viruses together makes the combination pretty serious,” Thomaidis said.
Thomaidis said the data show that Covid-19 spread far and wide over the holiday season. “The last week has shown increases of eighty-five to ninety percent in these viruses and this means that in the next two to three weeks we will have an even higher viral load.”
Number of patients with Covid-19 in Greece is on the rise
“We have more than tripled the number of patients with coronavirus and the hospitals are under a lot of pressure,” said Gikas Magiorkinis, a professor of epidemiology and member of the expert committee advising the Ministry of Health, said on Monday.
Konstantinos Kakonikos, a pharmacist and voting member of the Panhellenic Pharmaceutical Association, told ERT that the increase in demand for self-tests and rapid tests has soared by a thousand percent in the past few days, and stocks are running out.
The peak of the Covid-19 outbreak that began in mid-November is expected to arrive by the end of January, but it will not put significant pressure on the national health system, assistant professor of epidemiology at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, Gikas Magiorkinis, told Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA) on Saturday.
A committee of health ministry experts that convened last week suggested the observance of protection measures and the use of anti-viral medications are necessary, as are vaccinations against Covid-19.
Regarding the use of face masks in healthcare facilities and whether this will be made mandatory, a member of the committee said that no such proposal or even recommendation will be made.
They pointed out that there is an earlier recommendation to hospitals, which can bring back the use of masks depending on the epidemiological situation.
Related: COVID No Longer a Global Health Emergency, WHO Says
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