The rising number of COVID-19 cases has the potential to be disruptive to the whole country.
That is according to Professor Anthony Staines, who is professor of health systems at DCU.
It comes as health officials announced 217 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday.
That is the highest daily figure since May and takes the national total to 29,025.
Some 103 of the new cases were in Dublin, with 25 in Kildare, 17 in Limerick, seven in Waterford, seven in Wicklow, six in Clare and five in Louth.
Prof Staines told Breakfast Briefing: "We should be somewhat worried - the number of cases has been rising for some time and it is getting to a point that it has the potential to be quite disruptive to the whole country and the economy.
"But we are doing a lot better than other countries have done, and we are nowhere near where we were in April of this year.
"So we could be doing much worse, and there have been very, very few deaths because most of the cases are in younger people.
"We're hoping that the cases will not spread into older people - although that is the fear and that has happened in some other countries".
"The fear is that as the number of cases circulating in the community goes up, that cases will spread into two areas that are very important.
"One is in schools, and if we have outbreaks in schools - regardless of the response of the Department of Public Health - I think many parents will keep children at home.
"So it's likely there would be substantial disruption to the schooling in a number of schools, and we want to keep that down as low as possible.
"The other concern, as I said, is that it will spread to older people in whom the disease is often more severe.
"And as the winter comes, as the existing pressures in the health service - which are pretty bad at the moment, and it's just the beginning of September - but as those pressures ramp up, the more cases of COVID circulating the community the greater the pressures on the health service.
"So there's a huge imperative from several directions to take some very serious action to reduce the circulation of virus in our communities."
On reminding young people of the dangers of COVID-19, and particularly in relation to a social media video of young people from Skerries, he said: "I think we can do a couple of things: one of the things is fact-checking.
"I live in Skerries, and the facts of the case in Skerries are that the young people in question follow the social distancing guidelines.
"They made a really, really stupid, silly video about it afterwards - but they did what they were meant to do.
"But unfortunately and entirely unknowingly one person in their group became infected, but that's a risk that's really hard to manage".
"In a wider way... there needs to be a focus on messaging to a group of people who don't really read newspapers very much, who don't listen to radio very much."
"The GAA, for example, have done great work with a number of GAA players who have been affected, either themselves or in their families, with COVID.
"I think that kind of direct outreach from young people who know about what's going on to other young people can be very powerful".
