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Air Corps crews made 12 flights to Munich this year to deliver Covid-19 swab samples to a German laboratory for testing.
The flights have been conducted each weekend in January and are scheduled to continue over the next few weekends.
The Defence Forces said this is part of its continued effort to provide surge capacity to the HSE .
Chief Executive of the Health Service Executive Paul Reid said a total of three million Covid-19 tests have been completed to date and described this as a great milestone . It s never been easy and we haven t got it all right, all the time. But everyone involved deserves huge credit.
Updated / Monday, 11 Jan 2021
19:47
Sampling shows increase in incident of new variant (file image)
Ireland now has the highest daily number of new confirmed Covid-19 cases in the world for every million people, according to figures published by the Our World in Data organisation.
The seven day rolling average is 1,394 cases per million - ahead of the UK on 810, Portugal on 735 and the USA on 653.
The research website is linked to Oxford University.
As of 2pm today, 1,582 Covid-19 patients were in hospital, with 146 of them in intensive care.
Figures show that Cork University Hospital has the largest number of coronavirus patients, with 135 cases.
Italy received 100,000 fewer doses of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine than expected
From CNN s Livia Borghese in Rome
A doctor prepares a dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at a hospital in Cremona, Italy, on January 6. Marco Mantovani/Getty Images
Italy received
100,000 fewer doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine than expected this week, the office in charge of the country s vaccine distribution told CNN Wednesday.
According to the agreement between the EU and vaccine companies, Italy should receive
470,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine every week.
This week it only received 370,000 doses.
According to the country s Health Ministry, Italy has so far administered nearly 250,000 inoculations, which is 54.1% of the doses it received this week.