The HSE has held its final weekly Covid-19 briefing before Christmas, highlighting that the country faces a surge in cases in the coming weeks due to the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
Here's six takeaways from the briefing that you may have missed. Community positivity rate has risen to over 21% HSE National Director Damien McCallion said the test positivity rate among the community has risen to 21.2% in recent days.
He said the HSE is seeing an increase in community referrals over the past seven days too - up by 16% - with acute referrals and primary care GP referrals up also. "Yesterday was our busiest day so far in community testing with nearly 32,000 testing appointments offered across our testing sites," he told the briefing.