Covid-19: 378 further cases confirmed in the State

Another 378 cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in the State.

The Department of Health reported these latest case figures on Monday evening.

It also confirmed that there are currently 98 patients with Covid-19 in hospital, with the number of such patients in ICU unchanged at 35.

Also on Monday, a further 39 cases of Covid-19 in Northern Ireland were confirmed by the North's Department of Health. No further deaths from the disease were reported. The North's Covid-19 dashboard was not updated on Monday because it is a public holiday in Northern Ireland. Full data will be available on Tuesday.

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Meanwhile, it has emerged that the number of people travelling out of Ireland has continued to rise, with the majority of trips being to the continent.

New data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), published on Monday, shows a continuation of increasing journeys in April but overall activity is still far behind pre-pandemic times.

During the month, 73,000 passengers departed from Ireland on overseas routes, almost 10 per cent more than in March.

Previous data had shown that outbound passenger journeys by sea and air had increased by 25 per cent between February and March.

April also saw an increase in incoming journeys with 69,400 passengers arriving from overseas, an increase of just over 13 per cent on the previous month.

The figures also show a “considerable” increase on those travelling in April, 2020 when just 16,100 passengers arrived, and 17,800 departed at the height of Covid movement restrictions.

However, the CSO pointed out unsurprisingly that such overseas travel remains “dramatically lower” than pre-pandemic times when during the same month there were more than 1.7 million arrivals and about the same number of departures.

That means that the number of people leaving the country in April was about 4 per cent of those who departed in April, 2019.

"The statistics show that continental routes contributed most to the passenger traffic," said statistician Gregg Patrick. "Some 40,100 passengers arrived on continental routes and 37,300 passengers departed on continental routes.

“By way of contrast, 21,600 passengers arrived on cross-channel routes and 28,000 passengers departed on cross-channel routes. Just 3,300 passengers arrived on transatlantic routes and the same number of passengers departed on these routes.”

Apart from Britain, the most significant countries in relation to travel for April were the Netherlands (7,300 arrivals, 6,100 departures), Spain (6,300 arrivals, 5,000 departures) and Poland (4,700 arrivals and departures).

“When we look at the year-to-date picture (January-April 2021), the statistics show that 293,700 overseas passengers arrived in Ireland and 311,400 overseas passengers departed from Ireland. This compares to 3.1 million arrivals and 3.1 million departures in the same period in 2020 and 5.6 million arrivals and 5.6 million departures in the same period in 2019,” Mr Patrick said.