No further Covid related deaths in NI

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By Q Radio News

No further Covid19 related deaths have occurred in Northern Ireland. 

It means the total number of fatalities recorded by the Department of Health remains at 2,153.

Another 54 positive cases have been confirmed in the past 24 hours.

Meanwhile there are calls for the full lifting of restrictions in England to be delayed by a month beyond 21 June due to the impact of the Indian variant of coronavirus. 

Stage four of Boris Johnson's roadmap for easing coronavirus rules - when the prime minister aims to remove all legal limits on social contact - is scheduled to take place from 21 June.

But there is growing doubt over whether the prime minister will be able to keep to that date due to the spread of the Indian variant - now renamed as the Delta variant by the World Health Organisation - within the UK.

Professor Ravi Gupta, a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), told Sky News that a further easing of measures on 21 June was "a bit early".

"I think we need at least a few weeks - probably a month until schools have closed, when the risk of transmission within schools falls during summer holidays," he said.

"It then gives us another four weeks' worth of data to collect about how the [Indian variant of the] virus is growing in the population, what sort of rate it is growing at, how it is doing relative to the previous strain B117.

"And also how effective our vaccines are against this new virus.

"All of that information is coming in weekly and it will enable us to build up a better picture whilst staying safe and maintaining the gains we made through that really painful three of four months we had."

Prof Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology of the University of Cambridge, warned the Indian variant offered a "real risk now of generalised transmission in young people who are not vaccinated and, of course, school age children as well as those who are vulnerable and haven't responded to the vaccine".

He added: "We've got to a really good position and the easing has been well done so far.

"But we've obviously got this complicating factor which is this new virus that was identified in India... which has a new set of properties that we did not anticipate happening.

"We really should be making sure we think about what we're doing in the context of this new, unknown virus."

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