{"id":305980,"date":"2026-02-19T11:08:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T11:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/305980\/"},"modified":"2026-02-19T11:08:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T11:08:10","slug":"fears-of-second-surge-of-norovirus-as-cases-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/305980\/","title":{"rendered":"Fears of ‘second surge’ of norovirus as cases rise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fears of ‘second surge’ of norovirus as cases rise<\/p>\n

By Lee Peart<\/a> <\/p>\n

19 February 2026<\/p>\n

Fears are rising of a \u2018second surge\u2019 of norovirus after the vomiting bug reached its highest level this winter.<\/p>\n

\"(c)<\/p>\n

(c) CDC\/Unsplash <\/p>\n

There were over 1,000 patients in hospital with norovirus each day this week for the first time this winter, according to NHSE England.<\/p>\n

NHS national medical director, Dr Claire Fuller, said: \u2018It’s vital that we do all we can to avoid a second surge in norovirus at a time when the NHS remains flat out coping with winter pressures.’<\/p>\n

Having briefly stabilised in the first of week of February, figures rose for the second week in a row, up by 929 (8.9%) on the previous week.<\/p>\n

The average number of norovirus patients in hospitals per day rose by more than 2.5 times from the start to the end of January (from 361 to 950).<\/p>\n

The average daily number of adult hospital beds closed due to norovirus symptoms this week (1,257) is also up more than 8% (8.2%) on last week (1,162) \u2013 and has risen by over 190% on the first full week of January (432).<\/p>\n

This comes as hospitals continue to deal with high levels of demand, with almost 3,000 (2,837) more ambulance handovers with known handover times compared with the same week last year.<\/p>\n

Despite this, teams continued to handover patients on average more quickly than last year (32:03 vs 32:23).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fears of ‘second surge’ of norovirus as cases rise By Lee Peart 19 February 2026 Fears are rising…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[103,61,60,63211],"class_list":["post-305980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-norovirus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}