National daily Covid-19 case numbers confirmed

The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has today been notified of 5,767* confirmed cases of COVID-19. In addition to those numbers, 5,916** people registered a positive antigen test through the HSE portal on Monday 17 January.

As of 8am today, 979 COVID-19 patients are hospitalised, of which 93 are in ICU.

The highest figure for Covid-19 patients in hospital so far this year was 1062 on January 12. 

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Patients with Covid-19 requiring ICU treatment also decreased in the past 24 hours, with 93 patients recorded this morning. 

This is a drop from the previous day's total of 97.

Speaking on RTÉ Radio yesterday, Professor Paul Moynagh said testing recently has been "really saturated" and the positivity rate has been very high.

He said the numbers of positive cases over the last few days show that it "certainly seems they've peaked" and are decreasing now.

"If you look at these waves they tend to be symmetrical, we don't really know why," he said.

"So with Omicron, the incline was very, very steep, so we probably expect decline to be something similar and reflect that steep incline," he said.

Prof Moynagh also said symptoms from Omicron appear to be milder than previous variants. 

"Some of the good things are that it's a milder variant, relative to some of the other variants, and also the fact that it's not translating to anything resembling the rate of hospitalisations and ICU (numbers) from previous waves," he said.