“And it’s very hard to see how we’re going to get down, much lower than that.”

Leo Varadkar has said it's unlikely that Ireland will see daily cases much lower than 500 due to the new strain of Covid-19. Speaking during Leaders' Question today, the Tánaiste said that cases were "stuck" at 500 or 600 per day, and that despite the "enormous efforts" of the public, the virus variant has made it more difficult to reduce the daily case numbers. He said: “That demonstrates how serious the B117 variant is and how different it is to the Wuhan strain or the wild strain that we dealt with last year, and how perhaps getting down to very low figures like 10 or 50 or even 100 a day is not a prospect in the way that it was last year because this virus has mutated.” "It is now much more transmissible and it is now more deadly than the original wild strain and despite the enormous efforts of the Irish people doing all of the right things, we’ve still got stuck around 500 or 600 cases a day. And it’s very hard to see how we’re going to get down, much lower than that.” Varadkar added that 4,700 people had died of coronavirus so far this year. This is already more people compare to those who died of Covid-19 in 2020. The Tánaiste was responding to a question by Social Democrats' Róisín Shortall who commented that the country's daily cases remain "stubbornly high" and asked what the government was planning to do to reduce case numbers. “The vast majority of people have severely restricted their movements and their lives in what can only be described as a huge national effort to limit the spread of the virus,” she said. “However, increasingly, there is a sense that government has not played its part and has not done what it promised to do.” There were 683 new cases of Covid reported yesterday and 18 new deaths.