European health authorities are warning of a further increase in Covid cases this winter.
It's due to the emergence of a new variant and subvariant - which it says will become dominant by early December.
The new strains have already been detected in Ireland.
442 Covid patients are in hospital here, compared to 299 this time last month.
At present, there are 26 patients with Covid in CUH, of whom 2 are in Intensive Care or High Dependency Units.
There are 9 patients with Covid in the Mercy.
Dr Denis McCauley, from the Irish Medical Organisation, says there's no cause for panic:
"Variants aside, we were expecting an increase in those COVID cases and naturally flu which has now arrived in Ireland. The presence of the variants will probably make it slightly more infectious, but it's really a such an infectious virus anyway, so it is really what we expected".
