Holohan seeks stronger public-health messaging as Nphet advises working from home

The State’s public-health team has advised Government that people should work from home wherever possible amid surging Covid-19 case numbers.

A letter from chief medical officer Tony Holohan was due to be sent to the Government on Thursday night asking that public-health messaging be strengthened in the lead-up to Christmas.

The National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) met on Thursday afternoon to discuss the Covid-19 situation.

A source said that while they had recommended that people should be asked to work from home where possible, the letter did not contain any mandatory work-from-home orders and that businesses were “not being asked to shut up shop”.

Nphet to advise Government people should work from home wherever possible

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They said the team has focused on cutting social contacts and that asking people to work from home where possible would help with this aim.

“The message is that if people don’t need to be in work then ideally they would not be.”

Nphet has not recommended any additional restrictions whatsoever, the source said.

It is expected the Cabinet will consider the latest Nphet recommendation at its meeting next Tuesday.

The move to recommend an increased level of working from home came after Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said earlier that a work-from-home order was not something that the Government was considering.

“In terms of regulation or Government policy, that is not something we are looking at,” he said, adding that the Government was also not considering extending the requirement of Covid certs to other areas such as gyms and hairdressers.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin reiterated on Thursday that he did not anticipate a dramatic return to restrictions.

A further 3,680 cases of Covid-19 were confirmed by Nphet on Thursday.

As of 8am, 543 Covid-19 patients were hospitalised, of whom 97 were in intensive-care units.

Youngest fatality

Figures released yesterday by the Health Surveillance Protection Centre show a 14-year-old has become the youngest person in the State to die as a result of Covid-19.

The teenager was one of 25 people who died in the period between November 3rd and November 9th. They were one of six people under the age of 25 to have died in the State from Covid-19 in the pandemic to date. The previous youngest person to die from Covid-19 was 17.

The oldest person to die was 105. The average age of those who died was 80 and the median age (the point at which an equal number of people are older and younger) was 82.

A total of 5,566 deaths have been attributed to Covid-19 in the State since the beginning of the pandemic. Ninety-one per cent were over the age of 65 and 41.3 per cent were over the age of 85.

Monaghan has the highest number of deaths per capita, with a mortality rate of 169.4 per 100,000 of the population, followed by Mayo (167), Louth (166), Cavan (157.5) and Kildare (154.2). Kerry has the lowest rate in the country at 56.2 per 100,000.

There were 45,352 newly-confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the fortnight between October 27th and November 9th. Of those, 1,072 were in healthcare workers.

There were 6,330 cases in children of primary-school age between five and 12 (14 per cent), with 2,727 in teenagers between 13 and 18, 4,868 in those between 19 and 24, 6,875 in those between 25 and 34 and 7,856 in those between 35 and 44.

Almost a quarter of those who tested positive were a close contact of a known confirmed case, a further 22.8 were the result of community transmission and 51 per cent are still under investigation.

In Northern Ireland, 1,462 new cases were reported and there were six coronavirus-related deaths in the past 24 hours.