Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has said that he's "concerned at the rising case numbers" after Nphet recently reported almost 1,000 new cases.
On Thursday evening, 994 new infections were reported and as of 8am on Thursday, 80 people are in hospital with the virus, 22 of them in the ICU.
In a post online, Minister Donnelly said: "I'm concerned at the rising case numbers and we've had 20+ admissions to hospital in the past 24 hours. The vaccine programme is ahead of schedule and continues to give people greater protection. In the meantime we must be careful, stay safe and mind each other."
The recent spike has prompted Dr Tony Holohan to say that every aspect of the reopening of Irish society is "under review" ahead of the return of indoor hospitality next week.
Speaking on Virgin Media, Donnelly elaborated on the spike in cases and the risks that the Delta variant poses.
"We're taking it very seriously. We're not surprised, we obviously had warnings that this was going to happen. We've been watching the UK for some time and we knew cases were going to start rising. The Delta variant is much more contagious than anything we've had before so about 1000 cases tonight. It'll be about the same tomorrow we think, hospitalisations have gone up. They're still low but they're moving quickly enough and ICU is still very low but it is now moving up.
"The message from us here in the Department of Health to everybody is, 'we knew this was coming. It's a very, very contagious variant. If you are symptomatic, please self isolate yourself and get yourself tested. Particularly for those who are not yet fully vaccinated, make sure to keep following the Public Health guidelines that we know work so well like avoiding some of the higher risk activities - international travel for example at the moment - and then here in Ireland, avoid indoor socialising where possible and really keep doing what we've done so well. Mind yourself, mind each other and keep each other safe, " he said.
