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LAST UPDATE | 17 Feb 2021
THERE WERE 813 patients with Covid-19 in hospitals across Ireland last night, as numbers continue to fall.
The number of patients in an ICU is also falling, with 151 people in intensive care yesterday.
St James’s Hospital in Dublin has the most number of patients with Covid-19 – with 98 people currently hospitalised. It’s followed by the Mater (73) and Connolly (71). Outside Dublin, Drogheda had the most number of patients hospitalised with Covid-19 at 48.
HSE CEO Paul Reid said on Twitter: “For the first day since we hit the peak of this wave, we’re now lower than the peak of the first wave, on hospitalisations & ICU.
“The downward slope out of this is proving to be much slower than we would all like. But good hope.”
Last evening, the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) said that 33 further deaths had been reported in people with Covid-19 in Ireland, along with 744 new cases.
In a letter to Minister from Health Stephen Donnelly, deputy chief medical officer Dr Ronan Glynn said that the country “continues to experience a very concerning and fragile epidemiological situation.
“Incidence is falling but remains high and is currently four times higher than in early December 2020 and 100 times higher than July 2020,” Dr Glynn said.
“Our model projections show that if we can maintain a reproduction number between 0.5 and 0.9 for the coming weeks, we remain on track to have 200-400 cases per day by 1 March 2021, and 100-300 cases per day by 15 March 2021.”
Dr Glynn said that these projections are contingent on keeping transmission as low as possible for as long as possible.
These projections would see 500-600 people needing hospital care at the end of February, falling to 250-400 in mid-March.
He added that with the British variant now dominant in Ireland, the situation in Ireland remains fragile which “underscores the importance of maintaining the recent extraordinary efforts in order to fully suppress this disease in the coming weeks and months”.
Separately, vaccinations continue today for people aged 85 and over after getting under way yesterday.
GP Dr Sumi Dunne said yesterday: “The level of vaccine confidence and enthusiasm for vaccination in this group has been widely reported, along with a sense of relief as hope for a normal life returns.”
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I never did invest in a blackberry. I never had that 5 minutes to spare to send a text, or the navigational skills requires to change a setting. Totally unnatural computing…
Bye bye Blackberry!!
Oh how the mighty have fallen. First Nokia and now BBY, the two biggest companies at a time….
See what happens if you keep dishing out the same products year after year..
Eh… Apple same shit different advert and same idiots buying it up
That’s lego fu@#ed so
Same what???
Amazing the morons who are obsessed with Apple buyers.
Putting it away with my Betamax Video recorder.
I imagined Microsoft were eyeing them up. Combine them with Nokia, and you have a great army of hardware engineers …. Combine that with the software expertise and they can bring out a true end to end experience that could compete with apple and the Samsung/android devices.
Two bits of poo does not maketh a cutting edge byte
Earth calling Michael
Just to be clear, I hate blackberry products, and similarly dislike the Nokia ones- but they have some good hardware features (and engineers) as do Nokia. Windows are clawing desperately to find a decent hardware software offering. Seems like a triple win for the right price.
It’s no use, he’s on his BlackBerry.
Hahaha nope- I’m an apple freak. Closer to queuing up for the iPhone like the lads in the other article, than ever using anything else!
I have an iPhone. I use a blackberry in work. The BB is a solid device but it will never compete with real smartphones.
Playbook tablet is top quality however they abandoned it recently, let them rot
Ah, just sell it to the Chinese and let them strip the company appart and transfer all the knowledge and jobs to China…
Theres no beating the samsungs.
BlackBerry is fooked, so someone pays $4.7B for it. In a couple of years they’ll sell it to someone else for another few billion. The bankers get to keep the coins which stick to the shovel, probably about 100M. Wall Street, man.
struggling blackberry sold for $4.3billion! I have one and was going to let it go for a tenner ! Will have to change my done deal add!
Tumbleweed
have your say