DUBLIN, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Both the daily COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations in Ireland have dropped to multiple-month-low levels, said a senior public health official here on Sunday.
Ronan Glynn, acting chief medical officer of the Irish Department of Health, said that as of midnight Saturday Ireland reported 303 new confirmed cases of COVID-19, the lowest number of daily cases reported since mid-December.
"This morning we had the lowest number of people newly hospitalized with COVID-19 since the end of November," he said, adding that as of 8 a.m. (Irish time) on Sunday, seven additional COVID-19 patients were hospitalized in the country over the past 24 hours.
"People's efforts continue to make a real difference," he said in a statement published on the website of his department.
Ireland has been under a nationwide lockdown since midnight of Dec. 24 and is going to ease some of its restrictive measures starting from Monday.
The measures to be eased include allowing all the primary and secondary school students to return to school, permitting people to travel freely within a county or within 20 kilometers from their home, allowing outdoor gatherings for no more than two households, and reopening of all residential construction projects.
Under the current restrictive measures which are rated as Ireland's highest-level measures against the pandemic, people are prohibited from traveling more than 5 km away from home unless they have essential reasons for their travel, such as seeing a doctor and going to the supermarket.
All non-essential retail outlets such as restaurants and bars as well as barbershops and laundries must remain closed. So is the case with most indoor public facilities such as libraries and museums.
"Please do not take our children returning to school tomorrow as a signal to return to the workplace," said Glynn, urging people to continue to work remotely if possible and abide by the public health advice.
"If we can maintain this progress, vaccines and the basic public health measures with which we are all so familiar with are our way out of this pandemic," he said.
Ireland reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on Feb. 29, 2020. To date, a total of 240,945 people have been infected with COVID-19 in the country and 4,785 of them have died from the virus, according to the figures released by the Irish Department of Health on Sunday.
The department also said that as of April 9 a total of 1,045,919 people have been partially or fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in Ireland, accounting for over 20 percent of the country's population.
Three vaccines made by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are now being used in Ireland with Johnson and Johnson's single-shot vaccine expected to be included in the country's vaccination program soon.
Due to the limited and often delayed supply of vaccines, Ireland's vaccination plan has been repeatedly disrupted, leading to growing calls among locals to consider using other vaccines available.
Currently, 273 candidate vaccines are still being developed -- 87 of them in clinical trials -- in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain, and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Friday. Enditem
