Covid spike not expected to put pressure on health system, says minister

A spike in new Covid infections may indicate that transmission will continue to ebb and flow through the summer, but fresh restrictions will not be necessary, Health Minister Thanos Plevris said on Thursday.

“We expected this increase and it makes sense given the presence of variants that are more transmissible, so restrictions are pointless,” Plevris told Skai TV a day after the National Organization for Public Health reported 9,288 new infections from 4,496 a week earlier.

Plevris said that the rise in infections is not expected to put undue pressure on the public health system either, but he did appeal to people who are vulnerable to “apply some measures of self-protection.”

“None of the models we have been running show trends that will put pressure on the health system and would require that we take measures. Cases as cases are just one chapter. The issue is to what extent they translate into hospitalizations,” the minister said.

Plevris added that many of the new cases concern reinfections and many of those are with subvariants of the Omicron strain, which, he said, “provide no protection from getting ill, but do provide protection from getting seriously ill.”