Dr Tony Holohan has revealed Ireland's goal for the Level 5 Lockdown to ensure the whole country successfully exits the strongest and strictest restrictions after the recommended six-weeks.
The Chief Medical Officer said that in order to be on track for the possibility of some kind of a Christmas, they are striving to get "below 100 cases a day" by December 1.
He noted that being able to drop cases below this number after the six-week period would protect the old and most vulnerable as well as help to keep schools open and health services functioning.
He said: "If we were down at less than 100 cases a day, absolutely we would achieve what we are setting out to achieve.
"We would achieve the protection of the public health that's now at risk, we would have protected the school and education services, protected vulnerable people both medically and socially from this illness and protected the health service."
Surprisingly, the CMO once again had to reiterate something that has been heard and said hundreds of thousands of times since March - if you have symptoms, self-isolate and contact your GP immediately.
He continued: "The people who are most important are the people who now have symptoms that might be Covid. The people might have had a test or are waiting for a test or are waiting for a test result. Or anybody who is positive with Covid.
"These are the people either with the illness or most likely to have the illness. We have somewhere in the region of about 15,000 cases in the last two weeks of people with the infection, they simply must self isolate."
"We can not have people who are symptomatic attending work, attending school and looking after vulnerable people. We have had too many examples of that."
He added: "We have to protect some of the things that we've identified as a country as being most important to us. We want to protect the school system and the childcare system, we want to protect our health service for those people who need it most for reasons other than Covid."
"We absolutely want to protect the health and wellbeing of people who are vulnerable to infection."
