Statement from the National Public Health Emergency Team - Friday 3 December

The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has today been notified of 5,419 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

As of 8am today, 528 COVID-19 patients are hospitalised, of whom 110 are in ICU.

Day to day variation in the reported number of cases of COVID-19 does not impact on key trend analysis. Analysing over a longer time period such as a week or 14 days, smooths out any variations introduced by processing times, and provides a more stable picture of the trend.

The number of notifications on CIDR will differ from other HSE data sources, such as positive SARS-CoV-2 results uploaded to the COVID Care Tracker, for several reasons including:

• deduplication of repeat positive tests in the same person
• differing upload schedules by the laboratories to CCT and CIDR – uploading of positive records on CIDR by laboratories is a more manual process than uploading to CCT. Uploading to CIDR typically occurs on the day or within one day of authorisation of the laboratory test result
• the time required for the two-step method of processing notifications on CIDR - this typically occurs either on the day or within one day of laboratories uploading positive records on CIDR

Statistics on booster vaccinations are now available on the COVID-19 data hub.