People visiting nursing home residents should consider self-testing with rapid antigen tests beforehand, according to new advice from the Health Service Executive.

Regular visitors to residents of nursing homes and other long-term residential facilities should consider taking tests twice weekly, the HSE advises.

However, the facility is not required to provide or carry out antigen tests and is not required to ask for evidence that a test has been performed.

Hospital Report

“The inability of a visitor to perform self-testing for antigen should not result in a resident losing access to that visitor if the visitor co-operates fully with all other requirements,” the advice from the HSE’s Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) states.

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It comes as the Department of Health confirmed a further 21,302 cases of Covid-19 on Tuesday. Given the current high incidence of disease the daily case numbers are based on positive results uploaded to the HSE Covid care tracker the previous day and are provisional.

ICU patients

As of 8am on Tuesday, 884 patients were hospitalised with the virus, an increase of 80 since Monday, while 90 patients were in ICU, down three in the last 24 hours.

Chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan said in a statement: "For the second January in a row, a significant surge in infection from Covid-19 is having a major impact on essential services across all sectors, including the health service."

As schools are preparing for pupils to return this Thursday, he said it was “important that we continue to minimise, as much as we can, discretionary mixing indoors with people from other households”.

Given the “very high and rising incidence of Covid-19” across all age groups, it was “inevitable that children will pick up this infection from household contacts in the days and weeks ahead”, Dr Holohan added.

Meanwhile, 22 out of 25 pregnant women with Covid-19 in intensive care since last June were unvaccinated, according to the HPSC.

Pregnancy and Covid

Two of the remaining cases had received one dose of a two-dose Covid-19 vaccine and the remaining case had received two doses.

Three pregnant women with Covid-19 were admitted to ICU in the first wave of the pandemic, none in the second wave and 19 in the third.

The women ranged in age from 25-43 years, with the median age 33. Twelve had underlying medical conditions and 11 received mechanical ventilation.

A total of 697 Covid-19 cases were admitted to ICU between June 27th and December 25th, of which 217 died. Over 79 per cent had underlying conditions.

Some 29 children aged up to 14 were admitted to ICU during the period.

In Northern Ireland more than 30,000 people tested positive for Covid-19 over the new year period. A total of 30,423 new positive cases of the virus were confirmed between midnight on December 30th and midnight on January 3rd.

Some 15 deaths with Covid-19 were also reported during that period.

The majority of pupils returned to school in Northern Ireland on Tuesday following the Christmas holidays.