Ireland could be facing further restrictions ahead of the festive season as several government officials have refused to rule out the possibility of extra rules.
A raft of measures took effect from Thursday after an address to the nation by Taoiseach Micheal Martin earlier this week.
The Taoiseach announced new plans aimed at curbing the spiralling coronavirus cases reported across the country in recent weeks.
While the rules put in place are to be reviewed at the end of November, Mr Martin has not ruled out recommending more restrictions.
The Taoiseach said the picture emerging across Europe and in Ireland over the past week "are a cause of deep concern".
“NPHET did add the caveat that they said further measures may be required but they didn’t specify what those may be but obviously wants to give time for these measures to take their course and see what impact they have," he said on Tuesday.
“Nobody wants to go back, we want to try and keep society open and keep people working and the economy open but we can not guarantee what the outcome will be because of the nature of the virus.”
Speaking on Wednesday morning, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly did also not completely dismiss the possibility of a lockdown before Christmas.
"We want to do everything we can to keep everything open. No one can answer that question right now," he said when asked about a future shutdown on RTE's Morning Ireland.
"We know from Covid here and we know from Covid right around the world, things can never be ruled out. However, that's not where we are.
"In terms of Covid, every Government around the world will always say you have to keep all options open.
"There's no question about that and certainly the modelling we saw on Monday night is very serious and added to that is NPHET did signal that they would be keeping it under very close review.
"They could be coming back to us and making such recommendations."
Meanwhile, Tanaiste Leo Varadkar told CNN on Wednesday night that an update on the possibility of further restrictions will be issued in a fortnight.
"We're going to reassess the situation in about two weeks time and see if cases have stabilised and hopefully they'll be falling by then but there's no guarantee that's going to be the case," he said.
“I’ve always said that I felt we need to get through another winter before we can say this pandemic is safely behind us.
"It may be that this is a problem we have to deal with every winter and We need to make sure we prepare for that through vaccination and also other measures around test, trace and isolate, in particular."
Mr Varadkar added that unvaccinated people are at a higher risk than ever from the virus as "it's so prevalent in our community".
The comments from government ministers come after the Chief Medical Officer warned that the country could face 200,000 cases of Covid-19 in December unless the trajectory of the disease is altered.
Dr Tony Holohan gave a bleak outlook on the worst-case scenario that could arise within weeks unless the surge in the virus is stopped.
He said that even though Ireland has a very high vaccination rate, the Delta variant is extremely transmissible and requires us to continue adhering to other public health measures to stop its spread.
There is "no silver bullet" in eliminating the virus, and vaccines alone won't be enough to prevent transmission, he explained.
This is why NPHET issued the "difficult message" that "we all need to do more in terms of our collective adherence", he added.
"If we look at the month of December, we predict with our modelling that we could have as many as 200 [people in ICU] and potentially as many as double that if we don't make some progress in terms of cutting transmission," Dr Holohan told RTE's News at One.
"None of those people are infected yet, not one person who is going to have this infection in December has picked up this infection yet, so it's not inevitable."
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