NPHET member Cillian De Gascun has said it is too early to tell if Ireland will be in Level Two for Christmas.
The chair of the Expert Coronavirus Advisory Group said that while early signs are good, they hope to get the virus right down to double digits in terms of cases per day.
Speaking on RTE Radio One, Dr De Gascun said: "At this stage we don't know what level we are going to be at for Christmas, we are still six/seven weeks out so trying to predict where we are going to be(is difficult).
"The key message for people to take on board is people have done very well over the last two weeks, the case numbers are down, the incidence is falling, the R rate is below 1, that's a really good sign.
"The problem is we still have hundreds of cases per day, we still have over 300 people in hospital, we still have around 40 people in intensive care.
"To really suppress the virus we need to get numbers down below 100 and preferably low double digits.
"If we look back to May, June, July - we had a good summer from a coronavirus perspective.
"If we look at August, September, October - we didn't do very well in that setting(indoors)."
The doctor added that when lockdown is over they hope not to repeat what happened in those months.
The doctor said: "When we come out of this six weeks we don't want to be doing what we did in August and September as that didn't work.
"So from a NPHET perspective, over the next numbers of weeks...we're looking at how we can be better in December and January."
