The latest Covid figures have been released.
51 further Covid deaths have been confirmed in Ireland, as well as 2,608 new cases.
49 of these deaths occurred in January.
The median age of those who died is 80 years and the age range is 58-103 years.
There have now been a total of 181,922 coronavirus cases in Ireland since the start of the pandemic, while our death toll stands at 2,818 people.
1,019 of today's cases are in Dublin, while 204 are in Cork, 135 in Donegal, 132 in Galway, 131 in Kildare, and the remaining 987 spread across all other counties.
As of 2pm today, 1,943 Covid patients are hospitalised across the country, of which 214 are in ICU. 105 additional hospitalisations occurred in the past 24 hours.
Speaking on Thursday evening, Deputy CMO Ronan Glynn said: "There have been 532 deaths so far in January and we can unfortunately expect this trend to continue over the coming days."
Our R number is believed to be somewhere between 0.5-0.8, with somewhere between "1,400 and 1,700" new cases expected per day by the end of January.
It is also expected that eventually, the new B.1.1.7 variant will become the dominant strain.
Ireland is carrying out over 20,000 tests per day on average, over the past seven days.
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121,900 vaccines have been administered in Ireland so far.
Earlier on Thursday, the Department of Health in Northern Ireland reported that a further 732 individuals have tested positive for Covid-19 in the past 24 hours.
Sadly, a further 21 deaths have also been reported up north (five were outside the 24 hour period).
