Health Minister Robin Swann
According to the minister, the 4,950 care home residents tested accounted for 40% of entire care home population while 4,816 care home workers had also been tested.
Speaking at the Stormont briefing on Tuesday afternoon, Mr Swann said a total of 64,000 tests had been carried out in total.
He also says contact tracing for all confirmed cases of COVID-19 began on Monday.
The Health Minister said the health service must not return to the way it was before the pandemic, adding that COVID-19 presents an opportunity to improve the system long term.
He says the continuing threat of COVID-19 would limit what can be done in hospitals.
“Keeping people safe means separating Covid care and non-Covid care, that has been likened to running two health services in parallel with each other.
“This all amounts to a huge logistical challenge, it will require time, patience and ongoing funding.”
He says trusts have been tasked with developing service rebuilding plans and that there can “be no return to the way we were in December 2019″.
“Why should we aspire to return to a structure that was widely accepted to be flawed?”
The North of Ireland’s R number remains between 0.7 and 0.8, the health minister confirmed
The R (reproduction) number is a way of rating a disease’s ability to spread.
It measures how many people, on average, will be infected by a person with the virus.
If the reproduction number is higher than one, then the number of cases increases exponentially
Robin Swann says the Stormont Executive would provide details about the R number on a weekly basis to avoid getting into a “daily commentary”.
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