A medical director says people need to get behind the Government's coronavirus regulations, whether they believe in them or not.
Dr Jason van der Velde is medical director and founder of West Cork Rapid Response.
He was speaking as there have been eight more deaths related to COVID-19 and 4,929 further cases in Ireland.
Some 1,513 of the cases are in Dublin, 695 in Cork, 320 in Limerick, 305 in Wexford and 225 in Galway.
The remaining 1,871 cases are spread across all other counties.
As of 2.00pm on Monday, 1,582 COVID-19 patients are hosiptalised - of which 146 are in ICU.
While Cork University Hospital (CUH) was caring for 126 coronavirus patients at the weekend - around 20% of all of its inpatients.
Dr van der Velde told The Hard Shoulder from CUH that now is not the time for blame, in fact the exact opposite.
"We wanted our families to have an amazing Christmas given the year we had - it was an awful year, nobody's going to deny that - but what's done is done.
"There's no point getting angry, there's no point getting upset now.
"We've got a job to do, we've got a job to suppress this virus - we are all in this together, this is just the start of the peak.
"Now is actually not the time for blame... now is the time to row behind our Government.
"It doesn't matter what you believe and what they think, it doesn't matter if you believe that they're a heap of donkey [sic], it makes no difference.
"Now is the time to row behind the decisions that are made in difficult times, now is the time to row in behind our health service - regardless of the experience that you've had before or the experience that you hope to have in blaming this or that.
"It's time to row behind our community, it's time to look after our family and untimely ourselves.
"We're all in this together, let's just stop this blame game please".
'We knew this was coming'
He said this surge in cases is not a surprise.
"We're experiencing the predictable surge that we knew would happen".
He said hospitals are experiencing "what Italy, the US, Belgium, China were experiencing - and I ask the question 'Why would we be any different?'
"We knew this was coming".
He said he has never seen a disease like this.
"This is a particularly awful disease, people are usually with their full faculties, they're struggling to breathe - they're lucid right up until the point where they deteriorate to the point where we're having to breathe for them.
"It's scary, it's scary to have to say goodbye to your loved one at the... gate, knowing that you might never seem them again.
"I've never seen a disease that people deteriorate so quickly - [they] go from sitting up talking to you, walking out to the ambulance to absolutely deaths door and then dying".
Dr van der Velde suggested people do not want to believe the worst-case scenario.
"I think by and large what is coming out of the medical profession has been pretty stark, and people not wanting to believe us".
