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A spokesperson for the Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has said it is the Government s hope that by autumn, the Irish population will be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
The comments came after earlier suggestions by Justice Minister Helen McEntee that the Government did not anticipate having everyone vaccinated in the coming year.
A spokesperson for Minister Donnelly told Newstalk while the aim is to have everyone vaccinated by the autumn of 2021, this is reliant on the authorisation and availability of vaccines.
The Government has an indicative delivery schedule for the next two months, however a further breakdown is not currently available.
This means close contacts of a confirmed case are no longer being advised to get tested.
Dr Holohan explained: Testing and tracing is an exercise in containment and we are no longer in a containment phase. However, it is imperative that if you are a close contact of a confirmed case you restrict your movements and contact your GP immediately if you develop symptoms.
It comes a day after the
Some 490 people with the disease were in Irish hospitals on Thursday morning - a figure which has almost doubled in the past week.
While the figure in ICU stands at 42.
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The Justice Minister Helen McEntee has expressed her sympathies with the family of a Dublin man who was shot dead by Gardaí on Wednesday.
George Nkencho
was shot in a Clonee housing estate after members of the force responded to reports of a man with a knife in a local shopping centre.
Bullets were fired from an official Garda firearm after the man made several threats, and an attempt to resolve the situation with non-lethal force failed.
The Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) is now investigating the incident.
Minister McEntee told Late Breakfast With Mark Cagney many people are shocked.
Anybody who you invite to a party, there will be many there who are already infected and unfortunately they ll infect more. So if we consider that one infection with ten layers of infection causes up to 54,000 infections it is one of the most infectious viruses around. My advice is there is no congregating, no house parties. Any meeting or congregating has to be stopped now.
Meanwhile, Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan has told Newstalk s
Late Breakfast With Mark Cagney suggestions that the restrictions could last into March are a possibility. I can t rule that out, I couldn t rule that out - but at the moment, we have a four week opportunity.
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There have been 1,620 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ireland and 12 additional related deaths.
This gives a total of 2,237 COVID-19 related deaths and 91,779 confirmed cases in Ireland.
This includes the denotification of one death, and the re-classification of two probable cases to confirmed .
Of the cases notified on Thursday:
794 are men / 819 are women
65% are under 45 years of age
The median age is 34 years old
Some 498 cases are in Dublin, 203 in Limerick, 89 in Galway, 73 in Cork and 67 in Mayo.
The remaining 690 cases are spread across all other counties.
As of 2.00pm on Thursday, 490 COVID-19 patients are hospitalised - of which 42 are in ICU.