A GP has warned that one person could 'effectively infect' 56,000 people, amid warnings over COVID-19 complacency.
Dr Ray Walley is a member of the GP Expert Advisory Group.
He told Newstalk Breakfast: "The national statistics are now that 77% of the presentations with COVID-positive testing are under 25 years of age.
"Some of this is to be expected, because our youth have been very, very good.
"They have, basically, played the game and played their part in everything.
"And as we open up, unfortunately we have more congregating".
But he said: "The scenes of last weekend where people were attending bars and things like that were not good.
"What we do know is is that unfortunately when you drink a sufficient amount of alcohol, what happens is you become closer together - and that's not good.
"So what we need to do is learn the lessons, we need to get that infection rate - the R rate - down below one.
"It's now above one, and it wouldn't take a lot to get us back to where we were April.
"All we need is an R rate of approximately 1.5 to get back to April: we don't want that.
"We worked very hard for what we did, we need to maintain where we are".
"Very easily this can exponentially go up - it's a bit like flooding of land where it's been flooded before.
"It goes away very, very slowly - that's the nature of, unfortunately, something as infectious as this.
"What we need to realise is if you have 10 layers of meeting people, one person can effectively infect 56,000 people".
"You apply that to something like flu, and that's in the order of 14: it is a very highly infectious virus"
He also said people need to react faster if they have symptoms
"What we're noticing is that there is a degree of complacency.
"The individuals who are presenting are actually presenting five, six days into this, where they presented with some of the symptoms - be it a cough, be it a fever, be it shortness of breath, loss of smell, loss of taste.
"Subsequently we ask for isolation, we test them, we ensure that they keep to the guidelines after that.
"And there is a complacency in there in regard to approaching the GP with the symptoms, for which we then send on for a test.
"So people need to be ringing the GP immediately they get the symptoms: the next morning, or on a weekend, out-of-hours GP service.
"So that complacency needs to stop.
"Unfortunately this infection is still within our community and will be for many, many number of months and possibly number of years".
