NPHET has warned the Irish public "to pull back" from unnecessary social interactions over the next fortnight.
Cheltenham and St Patrick's Day are both coming up this week, while Easter Sunday is also on the horizon.
On Monday, health authorities confirmed that Ireland has recorded 575 new cases of Covid-19, but thankfully, no further deaths were announced.
Despite this positive news, there has been a recent spike in cases ,and Professor Philip Nolan has urged the public to continue to limit their social contacts in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.
"The situation that we're in now is very similar to the situation that we were in immediately after Halloween, where for a week to 10 days, case numbers increased," he explained.
"What's happening this week with case numbers relates to mixing and social interaction that happened 10-14 days ago.
"We're dependent that when we look to the coming fortnight that we've collectively heard the message to pull back from that level of social interaction and that we'll see cases decline again."
Given the rise in case numbers, the topic of a potential fourth wave hitting Ireland was also raised.
But Dr Ronan Glynn moved to quell any fears that this might happen.
"I'm not signalling that we're facing into another wave, I'm simply pointing to the fact that unfortunately, we've seen plateauing over the last week when compared to the previous week," he explained.
"When you look at what's happening across Europe, 18-19 countries have seen a deteriorating picture over the past few weeks."
He added: "We're still in the fortunate position in that we've seen a 30% decrease in the last 14-days when compared to the previous 14-days. The vast majority of countries are seeing an increase in incidence.
"To put it in context, if we had the EU average of cases, we'd be reporting on about 1,600-1,700 cases a day. That's what Europe is dealing with at the moment.
"If we had the EU average of hospitalizations, we'd be reporting somewhere between 70-80 hospitalisations per day. Right now, we're at 20-25 hospitalisations per day.
"We've come through a very difficult period, much more difficult than many other countries and what our population has done to get us through it has been phenomenal.
"Unfortunately, our incidence rate is still very high. We're dealing with a new virus when compared to last year, it's much more transmissible and we're concerned in seeing the plateauing that will lead to an R-number above 1, an increase in the number of cases and the knock-on that will have on public health.
"We still have a level of people in hospital that's equivalent to the peak we saw last November, we still have double the people in critical care that we had last August. We're by no means out of the woods on this.
"We've three weeks to go until measures are due to be looked at again. What we're asking people to do is very difficult - St Patrick's Day is coming up, Easter is coming up, the weather is getting better - all of this encourages us to drop our guard and mix with other people.
"If we do that over the next three weeks, we still see a significant deterioration and none of us wants to see that."
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