Digital Desk Staff
A professor of epidemiology says the drop in Covid-19 cases gives hope, but it is too early to say if the numbers have flattened out.
Last night, 4,842 new cases of the virus were recorded after Friday's record high of 8,248.
However, the country's 14 day incidence rate has risen to 1,162 per 100 thousand people.
UCC professor Patricia Kearney says lockdowns get cases down, but we must check people coming into the country: "We know that lockdowns have worked before, and they do bring the numbers down.
“The challenge is what you do when the numbers start to drop down and what we have done in the past is open up, then we start to see the numbers creep up again.”
She said this time we need to do things differently and try to eliminate community transmission as well as stopping the virus coming into the country from outside.
It comes as there are currently 1,285 people in hospital with Covid-19 and a further 121 people in ICU.
The figure is now four times higher than a fortnight ago when 321 people were in hospital with the disease on December 27th.
There were 102 additional hospital admissions in the past 24 hours.
In the last seven days the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) said that 180, 897 tests have been carried out, with a positive rate of 21,8 per cent.
Yesterday the HPSC revealed that one in 86 people in the Republic had coronavirus during the last two weeks.
The national 14-day incidence rate for Covid-19 now stands at 1,162.2 cases per 100,000 people, according to the Department of Health.
That equates to just over 1 per cent of the population, or one in 86 people, testing positive for the disease between December 26th and January 8th.
