“Our efforts now need to be on extinguishing COVID-19 in nursing homes,” Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said at this evening’s (Thursday) health briefing.

His words come as it was announced that a further 43 people diagnosed with COVID-19 in Ireland have died. Of those, there were 34 deaths located in the east, four in the west, and five in the south of the country.

In Kerry, there’s now 246 cases – an increase of 20 since yesterday.

Nationally there’s 724 new confirmed cases as of 1pm Wednesday, which includes 629 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported by Irish laboratories, and 95 confirmed cases reported by a laboratory in Germany.

The overall figure in Ireland now stands at 13,271, while there have been 486 deaths in total.

“Our model today is showing four reproductive numbers, illustrating the different stages of the disease in Ireland over the past six weeks.

“We now estimate our R0 to be between 0.7 and 1.0, which means current restrictions are successfully suppressing the disease,” Professor Philip Nolan, Chair of NPHET Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group, said.

“The data clearly shows that there are two very different experiences of COVID-19 in Ireland today,” Dr Tony Holohan added.

“In the population at large, the virus is contained and effectively suppressed. However, the experience of the disease in long-term residential care settings continues to be a source of concern.

“In order to protect the vulnerable the first task was to suppress the virus in the population at large. We are increasingly confident that we are achieving this. All of our efforts now need to be on extinguishing COVID-19 in our community residential settings, including nursing homes.”