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The National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) reported 429 confirmed cases of Covid-19 on Wednesday. This brings to 36,155 the total number of cases of the disease in the Republic.
Some 189 of the new cases are in Dublin and 60 in Cork. There were also 31 cases in Donegal, 28 in Galway, 18 in Kildare, 15 in Wicklow, 15 in Clare, 12 in Limerick, nine in Meath, nine in Louth, seven in Cavan, seven in Longford, six in Laois, five in Offaly , five in Westmeath, with the remaining 14 cases in eight counties.
One more death was reported to NPHET, bringing the total number of deaths to 1,804.
The reproduction number, an indicator of the extent of the spread of the disease, is now between 1.2 and 1.4, according to Professor Philip Nolan, chair of the advisory group on epidemiological models of NPHET. A reproduction number less than 1 means that the epidemic is disappearing; a number greater than 1 indicates that it is spreading.
“While we are cautiously optimistic about Dublin, we have seen relatively high case numbers in recent days, and it will be several days before the pattern is clear,” Professor Nolan said in a briefing on Wednesday.
“The number of cases is clearly increasing across the country. We have to stay vigilant, to make sure we don’t lose the ground we’ve gained in the capital city since we moved to Level 3, and to make sure we don’t see further deterioration outside of the capital. “
Of the new cases, 203 are men and 226 are women. Sixty-five percent are under 45 years old. Authorities say 45 percent are associated with outbreaks or are close contacts of cases, while 77 cases involved community transmission.
There are currently 130 people with Covid-19 in the hospital, including 15 admissions in the last 24 hours, according to Acting Medical Director Dr. Ronan Glynn.
“We recently asked everyone to cut their social contacts in half,” he said. “Reducing the number of people we meet and safely engaging with a small core group remains the cornerstone of our collective effort to reduce the spread of this virus and its impact on our health and the health of the people we care about. “
He said that while school-age cases remained stable, there had been a sharp increase in cases among young people aged 19 to 24 and the increase in cases among those over 65 was worrying.
Older people were at “serious risk” of cases spreading among people of working age, he said.
Rejecting the “narrative” that the disease was less serious or dangerous than before, Professor Nolan said that Covid-19 was “as fatal as ever for some sectors”, while young people were vulnerable “in a different way.”
Public health officials gave examples of recent conglomerates that have occurred in the west.
A cluster of 30 cases emerged after a young couple went away for a weekend and attended a house party. This resulted in six to eight cases and cases in three to four households. On the second day of their trip, they went with friends to the city center, resulting in four more cases.
They attended a bar, where six people at an adjacent table and four staff members tested positive. They then went to a “drink room”, where four more cases occurred.
In another group of 24 cases related to intergenerational social mixing, the outbreak started in a small rural place where middle-aged people had gathered. There was socializing in a pub and at a workplace and there was more broadcast in the pub over the weekend. Fourteen of the cases were directly related to socialization and 11 involved people between 45 and 70 years old. In the outbreak, there were three family groups, three schools were affected, and also a workplace.
A third example emerged from two student parties on the same night. There was mixing between the parties, which resulted in 21 cases among the attendees. One of these people later had dinner with a friend from college, who later went to class. Later, 15 of the 26 people in the class tested positive, giving 36 cases in all. The students were masked and observed social distancing, but public health officials believe the transmission occurred during recess.
So far, 87 cases have been detected in schools, of the 4,455 tests carried out, it was heard in the report.
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