Additional reporting by Vivienne Clarke.
The chief executive of the HSE has said the health service remains at '"high risk" despite the number of Covid-19 cases in hospitals falling in recent days.
Paul Reid confirmed there are now 1,367 patients with the virus in hospital, 205 of whom are being treated in Intensive Care Units (ICUs).
Mr Reid added there are also 301 patients receiving critical care outside of ICUs, while consultants are noting that patients are requiring ICU care for "longer periods".
#COVID19 hospitalised patients have reduced again to 1367. But with 205 in ICU & 301 receiving critical care outside of ICU, we remain at high risk. Our consultants advise of patients treated in ICU for longer periods. Please continue to help our hospitals to recover. @HSELive
— Paul Reid (@paulreiddublin) February 3, 2021
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According to the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet), at 2pm on Tuesday, there were 1,388 people with Covid-19 in hospital, 207 of whom were in ICU, reflecting a decrease of 21 and two patients respectively.
Yesterday's figures represented the lowest number of hospitalised cases since early January, with public health experts blaming the easing of restrictions at Christmas for the spike in transmission and the subsequent increase in hospitalisations and deaths.
Public health physician Professor Gabriel Scally said the recent increases in the number deaths associated with Covid was directly due to the easing of restrictions in December.
"There's so many countries around the world that are not experiencing deaths, and if they are it's a tiny number of people, so as far as I'm concerned any death is avoidable.
"A higher proportional of these [deaths] were undoubtedly avoidable if restrictions had been kept in place during the difficult period at the end of November/December," Prof Scally said.
'Worse than anticipated'
The president of the Intensive Care Society of Ireland, Dr Colman O’Loughlin said he is thankful there are 10 months to go before next Christmas after “things turned out significantly worse than we anticipated” following Christmas 2020.
Speaking to RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, Dr O'Loughlin said Coivd-19 was a “preventable disease” and if everyone had "held the line", case numbers and deaths would be far less.
Examining what had happened over Christmas was for the future, but it could not be allowed to happen again, he warned.
The number of deaths reported on Tuesday, 101 - Ireland's biggest daily increase since the pandemic began - had been “very sobering, but not totally unexpected”.
Confirming Mr Reid comments, Dr O'Loughlin said there was now a pattern of sicker patients coming into ICU and staying longer, adding it was a different pattern of disease and far more challenging, but there was no data available to tell if new variants of the virus were responsible for this.
Immunology expert Professor Kingston Mills echoed Dr O'Loughlin's remarks that the spike in deaths was predicted, but said he expects the numbers to decrease in the coming weeks.
"Now that the case numbers have gone down and the hospitalisations are starting to go down, we should start to see hopefully less people dying," he said.
