THE CHIEF MEDICAL Officer has said he is concerned about the level of Covid-19 infection in the capital, with 321 new cases reported in Dublin this evening.

This evening Dr Tony Holohan reported 767 new cases of the disease across the country and confirmed two further patients diagnosed with Covid-19 have died. In total, there were 103 deaths related to Covid-19 in the month of October. 

Dr Holohan said there is evidence that the restrictions are beginning to have an impact on the spread of the virus nationally. However he added there is still “a long way to go”.

In particular, he said, one source of concern is the situation in Dublin, where he said health officials “haven’t seen the drop in the way that we’ve seen across the rest of the country, in the way that we would like to see”.

He said there has been a big reduction in the seven day moving average in the rest of the country. In Dublin, however, there has been an average of 200 cases reported each day over the last week.

“That jumps around a bit, on one day over the weekend we had less than 100 cases in Dublin but then today we’re reporting a figure in excess of 300 cases in Dublin,” Dr Holohan said.

“We’d like to see that dropping. And this is a pattern that we’ve seen in other jurisdictions, Dublin is a large city with a concentrated population, that reflects some of the pattern of this particular disease.”

The 14-day incidence rate in Dublin is now 227.2 per 100,000, with more than 3,000 cases reported in the county in the last two weeks.

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Dr Holohan said the Level 3 restrictions in Dublin “did not have an appreciable effect in terms of slowing the infection” in the way health officials would have liked.

We’d like to think that over the course of the remainder of this week we might begin to see a fuller effect of all of phase five, not just the anticipatory behaviour we’ve seen across the population, but all the measures that were mandated by government having their full effect.

He said over the next week, the new cases will be those that could only have arisen through infection occurring after the point at which those measures were introduced and this will provide an indication of how well those restrictions are working.