A NPHET expert has said that Ireland is unlikely to exit a Level Five lockdown early.
Promising trends have emerged amid indications that the growth of the virus here is being slowed and possibly even reduced.
The number of new cases announced by health officials each day has also fallen below 1,000 for all of the last seven days.
There has also been a consistent drop in the number of close contacts reported by cases.
However Dr Cillian De Gascun, NPHET member and chair of National Virus Reference Laboratory, rejected suggestions that this progress would mean we would exit Level Five before the planned December 1 deadline.
He said the focus is on getting the case numbers as low as possible before December.
The NPHET expert claims that the lower our number of active cases is at the end of this lockdown, the longer we will be able to keep the numbers down.
Dr De Gascun told RTE Radio One: "It's far too early to say what the success is gong to be. From a societal perspective we want to get this number down as low as possible, because the lower we manage to get it coming into December, the longer the benefit we will get from the interventions we have put in place.
"I think it's really important that although the numbers in recent days have been positive, we still have over 300 people in hospital, in or around 50 people in intensive care, and even though the 460 odd cases yesterday is better than 1,200 we had a week ago, within those numbers people will end up in hospital, people will end up in intensive care, and unfortunately some people will pass away.
"It's very important that people continue to stick with the intervention and not consider releasing them early at this point.
"The plan at this stage is we have a six-week programme to get as low as possible in order to ensure that we can suppress the virus again to get back to the levels we had in the summer again ideally."
