Updated: 4.55pm
Public health officials in Ireland are planning to “reboot” messaging around Covid-19 protection in response to rapidly rising hospitalisations with the virus.
This comes as the Department of Health confirmed 16,019 new cases of the virus on Monday - 6,284 of which were confirmed through the PCR testing system. The remaining 9,735 cases were logged via the HSE's antigen result portal.
There were 1,047 people in hospital with Covid-19 as of Tuesday morning, up five on yesterday's figure.
Hospitalisations with the virus surpassed 1,000 patients on Monday for the third time during the pandemic, after previously peaking at 2,020 in January 2021 and at 1,063 in January 2022.
199 newly confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 114 discharges were seen over the last 24 hours in Irish hospitals. The latest figures also show 42 patients in intensive care, the same figure as yesterday.
About half of all Covid-19 hospitalisations are incidental, according to a report in The Irish Times, meaning they involve patients admitted for another condition who test positive for the virus while in hospital.
Over 30 per cent of Covid-19 cases currently in hospital are unvaccinated, though this group represents less than five per cent of the overall population.
Reboot
The newspaper reports that health officials are planning to “reboot” their messaging around Covid-19 protection in response to rising hospitalisations, but there are no plans to re-introduce a mask mandate in public areas.
Rebooted messaging will include advice to stay at home if experiencing symptoms, to exercise the option of wearing a mask and for unboosted people to get a third dose of vaccine.
It comes as the positivity rate of PCR testing has increased to 36.3 per cent, while antigen tests are now identifying the bulk of new cases amid the scaling-back of the test and trace system.
Almost 32,000 new cases were logged over the past 72 hours, with 11,253 reported on Saturday, 11,266 on Sunday and 9,371 on Monday.
