Director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory Cillian de Gascun has said there is an expectation that at some point during this coming week the cases will plateau.
Speaking on RTÉ's Saturday with Katie Hannon, he also said the number of close contacts is decreasing with people realising how "precarious" the situation is at the moment.
However, he warned that there is "most certainly" more cases of the virus in the community than the daily figures as contacts of confirmed cases are not being tested.
He said the measures in Level 5 that are implemented will work but people need to be more vigilant with new strains of the virus being more transmissible. "The UK variant is of more concern to us purely because of the amount of virus on