Now is the time to act if we want to celebrate Christmas with the least restrictions possible, according to Trinity Professor Tomás Ryan.

Health officials will meet again tomorrow with increasing concern about a several counties including Cork, Galway, Monaghan and Roscommon.

There were 363 new cases confirmed yesterday, with one further death announced.

The entire country is currently on Level Two restrictions with Dublin and Donegal on different forms of Level Three.

Christmas

Professor Ryan told Newstalk that our actions now can define what kind of Christmas we have to look forward to.

“I think the goal should be to get the country down, ideally, to single digits or around 10 cases per day in time for Christmas so that hopefully we can be in Level One restrictions by then or better,” he said.

“But the reality is that to achieve that, we may want to be discussing some proactive, not reactive but proactive restrictions, appropriate for a defined period of time.”

Last night, the acting Chief Medical Officer Dr Ronan Glynn said public buy-in and willingness to follow COVID guidelines remain the “frontline of the country’s defence” against the virus.

“Each individual effort will make a significant impact on the spread of this disease and, ultimately, on the numbers of deaths that we can prevent this winter,” he said.

COVID-19 rates

As of last night, there were 117 COVId-19 patients in hospital with 18 in intensive care.

Professor Ryan said the rising case rates make further deaths inevitable this winter.

“The death rate, the ICU rate and the hospitalisation rate are all increasing,” he said.

“This is expected as the virus is starting to make its way into the elderly and more vulnerable population.

“It is the same virus as last time; it poses the same mortality risk. We don’t really know how this is going to interact with flu in winter so it is very concerning.”

Restrictions

There are currently three counties with 14-day COVID-19 rates above 100.

There were 191 confirmed cases of the virus per 100,000 people n Donegal over the past two weeks, with 160 in Dublin and 115.7 in Monaghan.

Monaghan GP Dr Illona Duffy said restrictions are now 'inevitable' in the county.

“I think, while we all want things to be safe and we all want to keep things open, unfortunately if our rates become high it is inevitable, I would feel, that we are going to follow what has happened in other counties,” she said.

She said the rising rate in the county can be traced back to people travelling to Belfast to socialise.

“They were circulating and meeting other groups of young people and unfortunately, I think that is probably what has led to COVID coming back here to our community,” she said.

“We are aware that, in the North, the rates of COVID are much higher per capita than in the southern part of Ireland – especially in Belfast which has one of the highest rates in the UK.”

The National Public Health Emergency Team will meet tomorrow to discuss the situation.