The number of people seeking treatment for colds and flus is “certainly more than you would expect this time of year”, O’Doherty said. “Maybe we just happened to buy at the right time.” O’Doherty’s pharmacy hasn’t experienced a supply shortage yet. “A few weeks ago, sort of over a few days everybody started asking about Covid tests, doing Covid tests, talking about friends that had Covid.” “One day you sort of looked and went ‘oh dear, where are they all gone?’,” she said. Margaret O’Doherty, a pharmacist in Donegal, says earlier this year, antigen test sales had “practically stopped”, but she is now seeing a “big upsurge”. The latest figures show that there were 305 cases of Covid-19, confirmed by PCR testing, as of last Tuesday, 15 August.Ī further 488 were confirmed by antigen tests. “I would say we’re almost back to levels we would’ve had in and around Christmas time in terms of the number of sales of Covid tests.”Ī spokesperson for Boots Ireland told The Journal that the chain has seen an increase in sales.Ī pharmacy in Dublin confirmed that it is experiencing a surge too.Īs of today, there are 397 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in hospitals, with 15 of those in ICU yesterday. “Over the period at the start of the summer, so you could say from May, June, there would’ve been little or no Covid tests being sold,” he said. His pharmacy, Phelan’s in Waterford City, has run out of single tests and can now only acquire five-packs from the main supplier due to the recent surge in demand. Pharmacist Brian Tynan has seen a “huge increase” in people purchasing antigen tests. The Chief Medical Officer has warned of the Eris variant, a new strain of the virus that has been doing the rounds. THERE HAS BEEN a surge in the number of antigen tests being sold in pharmacies in recent weeks, pharmacists say, as Covid-19 case numbers continue to rise.Īdditionally, an unusually high number of people with cold and flu-like symptoms have been presenting in pharmacies this summer.
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