Last checked at 
By Padraic Halpin
DUBLIN, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Ireland is beginning to see
strong early evidence that its COVID-19 vaccine rollout is
protecting healthcare workers and care home residents from
catching the disease, health officials said on Thursday.
Ireland has administered almost 360,000 vaccines among its
population of 4.9 million, so far to healthcare workers, care
home residents and most recently people aged over 85. Just over
133,000 of those have received the second of their two doses.
The officials pointed to a sharp fall in the number of
healthcare workers contracting COVID-19 to below 300 last week
from almost 1,400 in the final week in January.
Ireland is mainly relying on the Pfizer-BioNTech
COVID-19 vaccine and has administered much smaller
amounts of the Moderna and AstraZeneca shots.
There were also fewer than 200 cases in care homes last week
versus 1,250 three weeks ago while the relative number of deaths
in hospitals and homes are falling more rapidly than elsewhere
after Ireland suffered its deadliest wave to date last month.
"Very hearteningly, we think we are beginning to see strong
early evidence of a protective impact of vaccination on those
cohorts that are in the course of being vaccinated at present,"
Ireland's COVID-19 modelling chief Philip Nolan told a news
conference.
The government has said if vaccines arrive on schedule, 55%
to 60% of people will be fully vaccinated by the end of June.
Nolan added that even though the rate of decline in cases
has slowed in the last two weeks, Ireland continued to make
"significant progress" against all indicators of disease during
a lockdown that was extended into April this week.
The reproduction number - the number of people infected by
someone with COVID-19 - remained steady at 0.6 and 0.9, despite
the near dominance of the more infectious B1.1.7 variant first
detected in Britain.
The number of cases per 100,000 people in the past 14 days
has fallen to 226 from a high of over 1,500 less than six weeks
ago.
"Continue doing what you're doing. We've gone from a
situation where six, seven weeks ago we were the worst in the
world and through the actions of people, we are now in the top
10 in Europe," Deputy Chief Medical Officer Ronan Glynn said.
(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; editing by David Evans)
