Covid-19 Ireland: No further deaths and 320 new cases confirmed

The number of Covid-positive inpatients is at its lowest level since Christmas.

There have now been a total of 4,718 Covid-19 related deaths and a total of 238,466* confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ireland.

Two previously confirmed cases have since been denotified, this is reflected in the above figure.

As of April 1, 893,375 doses of Covid-19 vaccine had been administered in Ireland. This includes 636,963 first doses and 256,412 second doses.

The million milestone is expected to be reached by the middle of this week.

HSE chief Paul Reid said Good Friday had seen one of the highest days to date for vaccine administration.

“We’ll have well over 900,000 completed by this weekend. During next week, we’ll have administered over 1M doses. April & May will see the programme scale up further again,” he tweeted.

“As we reach out into April and May, what we are going to continue to do is complete the programme for the over-70s, go through the programme, which is the next group, the medically vulnerable and we are working through that, we will then be tackling the age group 65 to 69, and then we will start to move through the new prioritisation based on what National Immunisation Advisory Committee have recommended, so then moving down to sixties and downwards,” he said.

“As the programme moves through April and May and certainly into June, you are now beginning to see it reach really widely into the community, and I think the levels we are at this weekend of our highest day done on Good Friday of over 30,000, really demonstrates to the public that this is ramping up very seriously now.”

Meanwhile, there have been calls for the government to vaccinate frontline workers while also staying on track with their age-based plan.

Antoinette Cunningham, general secretary of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors said yesterday that: “What we are proposing and asking the Government to consider is an occupational vaccine roll-out programme for frontline high-risk jobs such as An Garda Síochána to be run side-by-side with the age-based vaccination programme.”

“Everybody that we encounter supports gardaí being vaccinated, everybody sees the reasons why members of An Garda Síochána who have no choice but to go into a house, rush into a house, as my colleagues in the north-west of the country did two days ago, to an urgent domestic violence situation where somebody rang in extreme distress.”

“You go in, you do the best you can, you deal with the incident, somebody is arrested, they are taken into custody, and it later transpired that they are Covid positive, and now four gardaí are isolating because of that,” she said on RTÉ’s This Week radio programme.

John Boyle, general secretary of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, has also made similar calls for teachers to be prioritised in the vaccine rollout.