An infectious diseases expert has hit out at the Government for leaving lockdown up to people individually.
Jack Lambert is professor of infectious diseases at the Mater Hospital, Rotunda Hospital and UCD School of Medicine.
He told Pat Kenny authorities are not being proactive to tackle the numbers of cases.
"We have been in lockdown since the 26th of December, and our numbers are still 500, 600, 700.
"And if you look back in October, those were the kind of numbers that people were concerned enough to want to go into lockdown.
"Things are different now - this virus is even more infectious than the first wave, and I think that partially explains why the numbers continue to be high".
He said the enforcement of measures is just not there.
"If you talk to people, people are travelling, people are going here, there and everywhere.
"There's very little supervision or surveillance of people travelling, there's no enforcement of the lockdown from the Gardaí.
"I'm not saying lockdown is the right thing - but if you're going to tell people only to go 5km and only to go to work for essential reasons, if you've got people driving 10, 30, 50 miles, people going in for non-essential reasons, it explains the reason that our numbers are still high."
But Dr Lambert said he understands people are tired.
"I think people are burned out and people are tired, so I think there's an element of that.
"But everything is left for people to do it themselves.
"The communication from the Government is 'the numbers are too high, the numbers are not going down, we're worried about the numbers'.
"I think pro-actively we have to do things to keep the numbers down.
"So if we're going to open up the schools, we're going to open up sports we actually have to have a programme in place that trains people, educates people [and] enforces that they're kind of living by COVID prevention - rather than just saying 'these guys behaved badly'.
"There's a huge public campaign that needs to go on".
"I think we should open up the sports but we need to open up it safely, and we need to train people to do it safely so it doesn't backfire".
'EU got vaccine wrong'
In terms of vaccine, he said he believes the European Union got it wrong.
"I think the European Union got it badly wrong, they waited too long.
"Italy's trying to block AstraZeneca vaccine from going to Australia because they ordered it sooner, the UK put together a taskforce in July.
"There's lots of countries that have done better, they started planning this in July.
"And I heard announcements from the Government in October/November about their plans for the vaccine - that was the first communication I saw.
"And now we're kind of doing catch up - so yes, the vaccine's going to be slower than we thought".
He said as a result, we need to have a strategy to maximize the vaccine that is available.
