A further three deaths and 248 new cases of coronavirus have been reported by Department of Health on Saturday.

There has now been a total of 75,756 confirmed cases of the virus and 2,123 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

Of the cases notified today 124 are men and 122 are women, 67 per cent are under 45 years of age and the median age is 33 years old.

Hospital Report

A total of 99 cases were in Dublin, 21 in Louth, 16 in Limerick,15 in Meath, 13 in Cavan and the remaining 83 cases are spread across 20 other counties.

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As of 2pm today, 185 Covid-19 patients are hospitalised, of which 31 are in ICU with 10 additional hospitalisations in the past 24 hours.

Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said: “Ireland currently has the lowest incidence in Europe and has protected against the significant mortality and severe illness that many European countries, as well as the United States, have experienced.

“Our younger generation led the way, with the incidence in the 19-24 year age group reduced from 432 per 100,000 population to 41 per 100,000 population. This is an enormous achievement.

“We all need to recognise how well our younger generation has reduced their contacts and helped to protect the whole population. We all now need to follow this example in the weeks ahead.

“We can do this by planning from now for Christmas to reduce our social contacts and limit our activities to those that are essential and most important to us.”

In the North, nine more people were reported to have died with Covid-19, the Department of Health there said on Saturday. Six of the deaths happened within the last 24 hours. A total of 476 new infections have been detected.

Earlier the chairman of Nphet’s modelling advisory group Prof Philip Nolan said Ireland was in a very “delicate and fragile position” with regard to the level of coronavirus in circulation and people should carefully “consider the risks” of socialising over Christmas.

Prof Nolan said the country also remained vulnerable because the high numbers of people in intensive care and “as the Taoiseach has said, every contact counts now and over the coming weeks”.

Prof Nolan warned against people thinking they were safe if they had a negative coronavirus test, particularly those having arrived home for Christmas.

He said the risk of a false negative test result was “too high”, and for friends and family that was “a really dangerous position to be in”.

Prof Nolan said Nphet was asking people to do two things: “Think about how many contacts they really need to have in order to have a meaningful Christmas and to limit that to the lowest possible number, particularly now.

“If we restrict our contacts now over the next ten to 14 days it will really, significantly reduce the risk of a contact over the core Christmas period leading to infection.”

Secondly, he said people needed “to think about the risks in any given contact, to think about the risks of that contact and do everything they can to reduce the risk”.

Asked about the advice people have been given about mixing with three households, he told Saturday with Katie Hannon on RTÉ Radio 1 the advice was there should be “no more than three households involved in any event”.

But he said “ we actually want to be more conservative than that. Limit your circle to the smallest circle that you can. Meet them outdoors if you can. If you are meeting them indoors limit the numbers to the minimum”.

He said people should also “limit the duration” of such contacts. “I mean lets not get together for hours and hours and hours on end, over Christmas, longer visits have greater risks. He also said people, should remember to wear masks as much as possible and that windows should be “open a crack” for ventilation.

He said the measures were about “giving the vulnerable the gift of life over Christmas”.

“We can see the finish line here. Into the spring and into the summer the vulnerable in our society are going to be protected by the vaccine. We are appealing to people, for the remaining few months until we have significant protection from vaccination, this is the time to postpone some things to beyond Christmas.”

He said the impact of the opening up from the first of December would begin to become apparent in the next few days. He said his “fundamental message” was that we are “clearly in a higher risk “ position than society was in July.

He said best case scenario was that “we would see ourselves out into January with the level of disease not much higher than we have now”.

Alternatively he said “we could be very quickly back into the situation we were in in mid October with north of 1,000 cases a day and we would be very worried that many of those cases would be older, because of the inter-generational mixing over Christmas.”