PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIALS have confirmed 3,024 new cases of Covid-19 in Ireland.

As of 8am today, there were 458 Covid-19 patients in hospital, of which 90 were receiving intensive care.

Yesterday, there were 3,174 new cases of Covid-19, 460 people with the virus in hospital and 86 in ICUs.

The National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) said yesterday that there had been 56 deaths notified to them in the past week, bringing Ireland’s total to 5,492.

NPHET officials have also advised people to reduce their close contacts this winter.

CMO Dr Tony Holohan said it was about using the basic public health measures as advised last week, like mask wearing and hand sanitizer, along with the new advice issued yesterday for people to reduce their close contacts.

“We know it works,” Dr Holohan said.

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar told reporters yesterday that the government will never reimpose Covid-19 based on cases numbers alone. 

There are no plans to reimpose restrictions at present, he said, as Covid-19 cases are not translating into hospitalisations in the same way they were previously.

“We do have high case levels but the vaccine wall is holding. The number of people in hospital is high and the number of people in ICU is high but it’s more or less were we would have expected it to be at this stage given the protections so it’s a case of hold firm and stick with the plan,” he said.

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A technical issue impacted processing of Covid-19 cases on Tuesday 2 November resulting in an artificially low number of notifications reported on that day, and an elevated count on Wednesday 3 November.

NPHET said that given the impact on notifications for these days, the daily case numbers of 3,174 and 3,024 reported yesterday and today respectively, are based on SARS-CoV-2 results uploaded to the Covid Care Tracker.

“The technical issue has been resolved and daily case reporting through CIDR will recommence in the coming days,” according to a statement from NPHET.

With reporting from Gráinne Ní Aodha.