Almost 1,200 new Covid cases across island as numbers rise

NEARLY 1,200 new cases of Covid-19 were reported across Ireland yesterday.

The Department of Health reported 576 new cases of the disease bringing the five-day moving average to 580 cases per day. There were also 58 people in hospital with Covid-19 of which 16 were in the ICU.

While, in the North, there were 605 new cases of the disease and one new death.

Up-to-date figures of the number of deaths in the Republic due to Covid-19 are still now unavailable due to the cyberattack on the HSE’s systems.

Speaking yesterday, Professor of Experimental Immunology at Trinity College Dublin, Kingston Mills, said even though the case numbers were ticking up, a ‘significant number’ of them were milder or even asymptomatic. ‘That doesn’t mean that they can’t transmit,’ he told Newstalk. ‘We would be worried if it went over 1,000 a day. I think it’s containable where it is right now and if we manage to get everybody vaccinated and then we start on the under-18 cohort, I think we can be back to normal,’ he said. But he added the caveat ‘unless of course another variant emerges’. ‘The nature of the virus, it mutates all the time so we already know about new variants that are emerging in various parts of the world,’ he said. ‘The good news is the companies that are making the vaccines are already testing new versions, or are ready to test new versions of the vaccine that is designed specifically to protect against the Delta variant.’