Coronavirus: 15 further deaths and 1,247 cases reported in State

A further 15 deaths of Covid-19 patients have been reported by the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet), all of which occurred in January. This brings to 3,307 the total number of deaths in the pandemic.

The median age of those who died in 84 years and they ranged in age from 68 to 99.

Nphet also reported 1,247 confirmed cases of the disease, bringing to 196,547 the total number of cases in the Republic.

Of the new cases, 430 were in Dublin, 97 in Wexford, 87 in Cork, 84 in Limerick and 76 in Galway with the remaining 473 cases spread across all other counties.

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The median age of cases was 39 years and 60 per cent were under 45.

The 14-day incidence of the disease now stands at 501 cases per 100,000 people nationally. Monaghan has the highest county incidence, followed by Louth. Leitrim has the lowest.

On Sunday afternoon, there were 1,516 Covid-19 patients in hospital, up 24 on the previous day. This included 211 in ICU, unchanged. There were 39 additional hospitalisation in the previous 24 hours.

The seven-day incidence is 189.7, while the five-day moving average is 1,342 cases per day.

Chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan reminded employers they have an onus to ensure staff are encouraged to work from home or, where this is not possible, that their workplaces are safe for staff and customers and in full compliance with infection prevention and control measures.

“The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has comprehensive guidance on outbreak management and infection prevention control measures that every employer should be familiar with and activating on their premises. I encourage all employers and managers to review their workplaces and ensure they have effective measures in place,” he said.

Meanwhile, a further 19 people have died after testing positive for Covid-19 in Northern Ireland.

The North’s Department of Health also confirmed another 426 positive cases of the virus on Saturday.

There are 731 patients with Covid-19 in hospital in the North, including 69 in ICU.

Possible rise in cases

Earlier, a senior Nphet official warned Covid-19 case numbers in the Republic could rise by up to 10 per cent next week due to resumed testing of contacts.

However, numbers will start to fall again if people keep doing what they have been doing to curb the spread of the virus, according to Prof Philip Nolan.

The HSE on Friday recommenced testing of contacts, after stopping for a month when cases surged to record levels around Christmas.

He urged the public not to become “disheartened or distracted” by any rise in cases in the coming days.

Despite large falls in case numbers since the post-Christmas peak, with incidence down to one-third to one-fifth of what it was, numbers remain “an order of magnitude higher than we need it to be”, he said.

“We have made extraordinary progress over the month of January but let’s #holdfirm. We still have weeks to go to suppress the virus and get the level of infection and cases numbers as low as possible,” he said, in a series of tweets published on Sunday.

The average number of close contacts for adults cases is close to 2 and steady, compared to a low of 2.6 in late October, when it immediately drifted upwards.

Prof Nolan described the incidence among those aged 65 and older, and especially among those aged 85 and older, as “worryingly high” but added that it has started to decrease.

“The level of disease in the community in recent weeks is at least three times what it was in March-May 2020, but we’ve seen similar cases numbers in long-term residential care – they are better protected, but at very high levels of community transmission we just can’t keep the virus out.”

According to Nphet’s latest modelling, there will be between 200 and 400 cases a day by the end of February. “Let’s make it a shared objective to get there, and then take cautious strategic steps forward,” he said.

Indoor events

Prof Nolan told Newstalk's On the Record with Gavan Reilly the return to concert halls and packed indoor events was unlikely "until vaccination has brought us to the point of herd immunity", which is at least 70 per cent of the population or 80 per cent allowing for variants of Covid-19.

If cases numbers come down to below 400 cases daily “we will be living with some level of restriction whether Level 2 or Level 3 for some months to come. But it does give Government some options.”

Prof Nolan also said “there is a lot more we can do” to open sectors of society including schools and classes. He stressed that the evidence is that “there’s almost no evidence of transmission from children to children or children to adults”.

The president of Maynooth University said there was a "small number of cases that we've missed because the asymptomatic close contacts of cases are not being tested. That might inflate those numbers by about 10 per cent."

There might be “a bump in figures” getting stuck at 1,300 cases or so a day as they were cases “we would have been missing for the last three or four weeks. They would have been perfectly safe because they would have been advised to stay home but we simply wouldn’t have tested them.”

Zero Covid

He reiterated his view that a zero-Covid policy is not possible. He said there was a shared objective to bring case numbers to as close as practicable to zero and to “absolutely minimise the risk of importation of new cases or variants” and to resource regional public health departments so they can track new cases.

But he said he differed from some advocates of zero Covid who said that they could go to Level 1 or level zero “the kind of sunlit uplands”. He said: “I simply don’t think that’s a realistic proposition and it’s of concern to say that kind of thing to the public because the reality is that we are going to be living with social distancing, masks, very limited social gatherings, no non-essential travel for some considerable time.

“And I think there’s an obligation on those of us who are advising Government to be straight about that.” – Additional reporting: PA