Health chiefs said last night Christmas can be saved if the public does the right thing over the next three weeks.
Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said public health experts NPHET are conscious of Christmas and we need to get the disease as low as possible so families can mingle.
He said the country would get through the festive period “very well if we go into Christmas at 50 cases a day”.
But he said he was genuinely worried about the disease now - there were five deaths yesterday and 611 new cases.
And yesterday as Level 3 restrictions began, drivers were caught in 8km tailbacks for up to five hours as gardai checkpoints strove to stop the spread of the virus.
Dr Holohan said:“We will give specific consideration to Christmas - we hope we’re not in a situation in disease terms where we’re having to advise the population that they can’t meet other households or travel outside of their households at Christmas time because we understand how socially challenging that would be for people.
“It’s in our minds, we haven’t had an expressed conversation about Christmas, but each of us is conscious - we all live in this country, we know what it’s like here.
“I think that something will happen to the reproductive number over Christmas which would be almost out of our control in the sense that we’ll all, maybe some of us included, not be as adherent to some of the rules as we should be.
“Christmas will be a challenging time, what we have to try and ensure is we get the disease as low as possible before that.
“If I could just figuratively give an example, if our reproductive number over the two weeks of Christmas ends up being 2 or 2.5 because of the way we socialise over Christmas, well, it matters greatly if we go into Christmas at 50 cases a day, 500 cases a day or 1,000 cases a day.
“Because we will get through Christmas very well if we go into Christmas at 50 cases a day and the R number is 2.5, we’ll be fine.”
Professor Philip Nolan added: “We can still save Christmas I presume, if we do the right thing over the next three weeks.”
