Another 22 covid-19 related deaths confirmed in NI and 705 cases

by Q Radio News

22 more people have died in Northern Ireland after contracting covid-19. 

It brings the death toll recorded by the Department of Health to 1,581. 

In the past 7 days, 121 covid-19 related deaths have been recorded by the Department. 

Meanwhile, 705 people have also tested positive for coronavirus in the past 24 hours. 

However, the figure may be an underestimation due to technical issues with data on the department's dashboard. 

Image from Department of Health dashboard

In the last 7 days, there have been 7,051 positive cases of coronavirus in Northern Ireland. 

Meanwhile, there are currently 840 covid-19 inpatients in hospitals across Northern Ireland, with hospital occupancy sitting at 95%. 

62 people are in ICU with the virus and 45 are on ventilators. 

30 intensive care beds are available across the region.

It comes as Stormont's Health Minister has warned it is "highly unlikely" coronavirus restrictions will be eased after the six-week lockdown ends.

Robin Swann said although the R number has dropped to 0.7, the number of cases and hospital inpatients with the virus remains high.

The Stormont Executive agreed the tough range of measures in December to start from Boxing Day until February 6.

Mr Swann said with daily case and hospital numbers remaining high, the restrictions are likely to be required for longer.

Yesterday the Minister said, “We’re still looking at 1,000 positive cases, on average, per day. Those are high numbers.

“We’re still looking at massive numbers in our hospitals, over 840 people still in hospital. We are in the middle of our six-week lockdown, we said we’d review where we are on January 21, as to what steps we will take on February 6.

“R is coming down but it is coming down from a very high level of number of cases so that decrease has to be maintained for a long period of time, for I would say another two to three weeks before we can get those numbers of positive cases, before we can get the number of hospital admissions down so that we can really see the pressure starting to come off our hospitals and our health service.

“It will be highly unlikely that we will see any great easement of where we currently are. These conversations are being had by many governments across these islands, across the world, as to what steps we can take.”

He added in an interview with the BBC: “I wouldn’t want to say we will be in this format of this lockdown for another eight to 10 weeks, but will I say that we’ll go back to complete normality? No.”