Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said that “our schools are safe places for our children”.

He made the comment during a visit to Tipperary University Hospital for the official opening of a new unit on Friday.

Mr Martin said it was important that the public had a sense of perspective of the issues about children and Covid. He said the biggest issues so far facing children getting sick concerned general respiratory illness and not Covid.

Hospital Report

Staff at the hospital, he said, had told him that very few children were admitted with Covid but quite a lot were admitted with a respiratory illness.

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That, said Taoiseach Martin, has to be the context when people are talking about schools and other issues.

With a decision on vaccinations for children aged over five expected to be taken over the coming weeks, the Taoiseach’s comments came as a a teachers’ union called for increased action to counter the spread of Covid in classrooms.

That call came hours before a further 2,549 Covid-19 cases were reported in the State. The National Public Health Emergency Team said that as of 8am on Friday, 481 people were hospitalised with Covid-19, of which 97 were in intensive care units.

Before the announcement of the latest figures, the Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO) had called for the resumption of contact tracing in primary schools amid the recent surge in Covid-19 cases in Ireland.

Pupils who do not show any symptoms after close contact with someone who has Covid-19 have not been required to restrict their movements since late September, when the Government accepted National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) recommendations on measures for children aged up to 13 years.

Intervention

President of the INTO Joe McKeown told Newstalk Breakfast the rise in Covid-19 infections in the community required the intervention of public health authorities.

“We said the Government should take a cautious approach in relation to schools and we said the Government should wait until Halloween before deciding whether or not to remove the risk assessments and the contact tracing.

“But the decision was made at the end of September on the basis that numbers were going to stabilise and decline. As you know and we all know that hasn’t happened. Numbers have gone up. ”

Mr McKeown said last week 2,393 primary school children tested positive for Covid-19.

Schools will reopen next week as planned, despite the rising number of Covid-19 cases among children aged between five and 12.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin said no consideration was being given to extending the mid-term break.

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar separately said of the possibility of an extended half-term or Christmas break: "We're not anywhere near that point yet. And the thing we need to prioritise for kids is school because they've missed enough school already . . . I think we'd need to see a very serious deterioration in the situation before we'd get to that point."

A further 2,605 new Covid-19 cases were confirmed on Thursday.

The INTO has also called for a pilot antigen testing scheme to begin without delay in primary schools. Mr McKeown said antigen testing may have a role in facilitating the attendance of children in school.

“We are also in a situation where we know over 2,000 children were out of school with Covid but we have no idea how many parents kept their children outside of school this week because they heard there might have been a case in a class.”

Halloween

Mr McKeown added that the advice given by deputy chief medical officer Ronan Glynn that parents should restrict the after school activities of their children was a "sensible" intervention.

“We are delighted that this Halloween is going to be a lot better Halloween [than last year]. We can continue to enjoy ourselves and do good things but it makes sense for all of us to try as hard as we can to keep our contacts a bit lower than we might have done when case numbers were lower.”

Meanwhile, immunologist at NUI Maynooth Prof Paul Moynagh expressed "surprise" at Dr Glynn's call to parents , stressing that the focus should be on improving conditions in schools where class sizes can reach up to 30.

In an interview on Newstalk Breakfast, Prof Moynagh described children’s activities outside school as generally low risk.

“We seem to be saying that the activities outside of school are higher risk than the risk in school where there is 30 children in a room for five hours. I absolutely agree that schools should be open but that to me probably poses a higher risk. ”

Prof Moynagh said we should be increasing our emphasis on issues such as ventilation, portable air filtration and antigen testing rather than zoning in on low-risk outdoor activities partaken in by children.

He said the messaging around antigen testing had been inconsistent. However, he welcomed suggestions that vaccinated asymptomatic close contacts could potentially receive antigen tests in school.

Prof Moynagh said we need to mitigate risks of school with antigen testing.

“If we go down the contact tracing close contacts in school and again get parents to use antigen tests and each day they test negative I would suggest allowing the children to go to school. These antigen tests are picking up most of the infectious cases.”

Separately, in Northern Ireland seven further deaths of Covid-19 patients were reported on Friday.

The North’s Department of Health also reported another 1,321 cases of the virus. – Additional reporting: PA