Five-day moving average of Covid-19 cases drops by 10% in the past week to 369

Figures from the HSE also show the number of patients in public hospitals with the virus has fallen by 16% in the last seven days to 186.

269 new cases of Covid-19 were announced by the Department of Health last night, while one further death was reported.

UCC Professor Gerry Killeen, who is also a founding member of ISAG which advocates for Zero Covid, says people need to continue to work in driving down the virus due to the new variants:

"We need to put ourselves into a good place where we can cope with whatever Mother Nature throws at us, in terms of new variants, you know.  We've already got much scarier variants than B117 around, we've got P1 which is even more transmissible, we've got B1351 which sidesteps one of our vaccines quite effectively."