The current Level Five measures were put in place for a period of six weeks, and are due to expire on December 1.
While it doesn't look like health officials are going to speed up our exit from the current lockdown, the early positive signs suggest that we might be able to relax restrictions on schedule.
Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said yesterday the plan for next month is to “open back up” and added “there is a possibility it might be Level Two”.
Mr Donnelly told RTE: “The plan for December is, for the first week of December, to open back up.
“There are various ways that can be done which will be given further consideration closer to the date, but critically to keep the country open. So, for example, it could be a Level 3, there is a possibility that it might be Level Two, or maybe a regional approach would be taken.”
However it is important to know what level of progress we need to see by the end of the month, and experts from the National Public Health Emergency Team have given us some indication of what they are looking for.
Here is what we know so far about what needs to be done:
1. Reach around 100 cases a day
One broad target set by health experts is to reduce our number of daily cases to roughly 100 a day by December. This would be a huge decrease from the levels we were seeing before Level Five came in, where more than 1,000 cases a day were often recorded.
Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan explained last month: "Our hope would be that we can get the infections down to a level we can manage with.
"The lower go, the better we'll do, the longer it will take for the infections to rise again. In simple terms it would matter greatly if we went into Christmas with 500 cases a day, or 50 a day.
"We don't want to be in a situation where we have to ask people to restrict very substantially the things we hold dear at Christmas time, that will be difficult to all of us.
"But there are things that will have to be different. We're not going to go back to a Christmas like we knew last year, none of us knew anything about Covid last Christmas. This is something new, there is clearly going to have to be a change to the way we live through Christmas like any other time of the year, while we have this virus circulating."
2. Lower incidence rates
The 14-day incidence rate of confirmed cases per 100,000 population is one of the most important measures used by health officials to determine how many restrictions are necessary.
And unfortunately, the numbers in Dublin are remaining stubbornly high at present, with up to 40% of all cases being recorded in the capital on any given day, while its incidence rate currently stands at 201.5.
Strategists in Government are starting to consider different levels of restrictions in different regions, to allow for less severe restrictions in towns or counties that have Covid rates under control.
Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said yesterday: “The rate is falling well in some parts of the country, but again in Dublin it’s not falling as quickly.
“There are some parts of Dublin where it is not falling quickly and there is one part in the south-west where it is not falling at all. And there’s parts of North Dublin where it is actually going back up again.
“So all of this detail has to be looked at as we figure out what’s the best way to open up as much as we can, but critically to do it in a way that doesn’t allow for the virus to spike again.”
3. As much suppression as possible
Dr Cillian De Gascun, NPHET member and chair of National Virus Reference Laboratory, rejected suggestions that our recent 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."
