Health officials say they are looking at expanding COVID-19 testing to nursing homes where no coronavirus cases or clusters have been reported to date.
It's part of a coordinated nationwide effort to see how prevalent the virus is in community residential settings.
Yesterday it was confirmed that a further 41 people have died after contracting the virus, bringing the death toll in the Republic to 406.
Of those, 187 COVID-19 deaths occurred in nursing homes, while 35 deaths have also been reported across other residential institutions.
A total of 156 clusters have now been identified in the country's nursing homes.
Image: HPSCSpeaking yesterday evening, Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said officials want to focus on stopping the virus getting into unaffected nursing homes in the first place.
He explained: "One of the things we did look at was the importance of maybe moving to try to do some sampling work in other nursing home settings that haven't identified clusters, so that we can maybe proactively begin to identify if this virus is in other settings.
"As we've said all along, one of the things we want to try to do in as much as we can is prevent this infection getting into nursing homes that haven't got any identified cases."
Meanwhile, the Health Minister is to meet Nursing Homes Ireland again on Friday to discuss the outbreak across the sector.
Yesterday evening, Simon Harris met with management of the orgainsation - which represents hundreds of private nursing homes - to see what more can be done to stop the spread of the virus.
Minister Harris said up to 350 nursing homes still haven't seen any cases of COVID-19.
He stressed he wants to do "everything that is humanly possible to protect older people and people with underlying health conditions, many of whom reside in our nursing homes".
