The Ministry of Health has confirmed 5,959 new cases of Covid-19.

There are 640 patients hospitalized with the virus, down from three as of the same time yesterday.

Among them, 121 people are being treated in intensive care, three more than yesterday.

The number of Covid-19 cases reported today is the highest since January 10, when 6,888 cases were confirmed.

It is also the sixth-highest daily total since the start of the pandemic, and is close to double the 3,138 cases reported yesterday.

Despite the large day-to-day increase, a spokesperson for the health ministry said “there are currently no specific delays in processing time or backlog of laboratory diagnoses.”

In Northern Ireland, 1,846 positive cases and six deaths have been reported in the past 24 hours.

The chair of the NPHET expert advisory group and director of the National Reference Laboratory for Viruses said Ireland could not afford to continue as a country on this trajectory over the coming weeks.

Speaking on RTÉ on Saturday with Justin McCarthy, Dr Cillian de Gascun said the situation was “very serious in many ways”.

He said no one had been infected yet as of December and urged people to redouble their efforts to try to control the infection.

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“We know that the public health measures that people have been practicing for the past two years will be effective against this virus,” he said.

“The problem is, we have to do them better and do them for a longer period of time to get the same advantage with Delta that we would have had with the original virus in 2020, and even with Alpha around the start of the new year.”

Dr de Gascun said no one wanted to go back to the days of the lockdown because it was damaging to society as a whole.

He said one of the metrics that have tracked the outbreak well over the past two years is the average number of close contacts a case has.

He said they knew that if the average number is three or more, the epidemic is increasing, and if it is around two, then the epidemic is decreasing.

“Our current number is between six and seven, and it’s just not sustainable,” he said.

“And it’s not to criticize people – obviously people have had a difficult two years – but we really need to reduce our discretionary contacts.

“If we do this at all levels as a society and continue to apply public health measures, then we can take back control, because we know the boosters will have an effect. “

When asked if there was a possibility of further restrictions when the NPHET meets again, Dr de Gascun said they could not rule out this possibility if the number of contacts could not be reduced.

The virus “does not get tired,” he said, and because it is now more transmissible, we are not getting “the same value for money” from public health measures as there were 18. month.

He said any measure that could reduce a person’s discretionary contact count can be helpful.

“Maybe the fact now that the government has started to reintroduce restrictions can make people realize that it is not over yet.”

Dr de Gascun said the problem is that the virus has changed and evolved and the vaccines “aren’t as effective” and they now realize that the vaccine can be a three-dose primary treatment.

He said they hope the booster will increase levels of protection and increase the duration of protection against infection.

He said that apart from family contacts everything should be seen as discretionary to some extent.

“It’s important that we try to plan our social interactions for the week,” he said.

“It may be a different person every week, we are not necessarily talking about bubbling up the same way we would have been earlier in the pandemic.”

Dr de Gascun said the hospitality and entertainment industries have put in “a lot” of mitigation measures to try to ensure people can return safely, so if you plan to attend at an event, you can use antigen testing to further mitigate the risk.

He advised people to leave if they felt the setting was unsafe.

He said they don’t want people to stop doing everything, but they want people to think about everything they do and reduce the number of discretionary contacts.

Regarding tomorrow’s rugby match, Dr de Gascun said everyone present should “absolutely” wear face masks outside of the time of eating or drinking.

Regarding antigen testing, he said it was important to properly educate people and educate them on how to do the test, but said the tests have limitations in themselves. .

“With antigen testing, there isn’t necessarily an internal control,” he said. “So the test may work, but we don’t necessarily know the quality of the sample, we don’t know if it was effective.

“We also know that the sensitivity can be reduced in certain settings and that’s why we want people to compensate for this reduced sensitivity with repeated testing, because you’re very unlikely to get repeated false negatives.

“We want people to use them correctly but also not to use them as a green light.

“In the context of the pandemic, they are one more measure to mitigate the risk but they are not a silver bullet, in the same way, unfortunately, that vaccines have not proved to be a silver bullet.”

Dr de Gascun said that in order to benefit from population-level testing, people need to do them more than once if they participate in high-risk activities.

He said they want to implement long-term sustainable measures.

He said antigen testing is not cheap and many families will struggle to bear the recurring costs.