Tanaiste Leo Varadkar has warned we could be seeing the start of a Covid "summer wave" as the number of people hospitalised has soared to over 300.
A total of 311 patients suffering from Covid have been admitted to hospitals in Ireland, according to the figures recorded on Thursday at 8am. Of these, 24 confirmed cases in the ICU.
The Fine Gael leader urged people to get their booster shots as the rising cases could be a sign of a new wave.
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He said on Twitter: "Number of people in hospital who are positive for Covid has risen above 300. ICU cases rising too. Could be a blip.
"Could be start of a summer wave. Immunity is waning though for sure. Please get your booster if you haven’t."
It comes as officials in the United States have warned that as many as 100 million Americans could be infected with Covid-19 this winter.
The Joe Biden administration said a potentially significant wave of deaths could hit this autumn and winter, driven by new omicron subvariants that have shown a remarkable ability to escape immunity.
Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health told the Washington Post: “What they’re saying seems reasonable — it’s on the pessimistic side of what we projected in the Covid-19 scenario modelling run.
“It’s always hard to predict the future when it comes to covid, but I think we’re at a point now where it’s even harder than normal. Because there’s so much sensitivity, in terms of these long-term trends, to things we don’t understand exactly about the virus and about [human] behaviour."
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