The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned young people who want to socialise with others amid coronavirus restrictions that they 'only have one life'.
It comes as the global tally of cases moved past 16 million - including one million in the past few days alone.
The US remains the most affected region, with over four million cases, followed by Brazil, India and Russia.
WHO spokesperson Dr Margaret Harris told Newstalk Breakfast she understands that young people want to meet up.
"This is the great difficulty, especially in the middle of a lovely summer, and you're only young once."
"But you've also only got one life, and you've also only got one family and one lot of friends - and if you unwittingly infected them and killed them, you've lost them forever".
"It's a really difficult message actually with any infectious disease, even something as horrific as Ebola.
"Where I worked in West Africa and in Congo, many people would say 'Ebola is not real' - because if you haven't seen the consequences in front of you, you still think 'Yeah but it's not me, it's somebody else, it's somebody else's problem'".
Dr Harris also said smaller lockdowns, rather than a blanket approach, is the way to go forward.
"You can do it if you've got the testing, tracking and tracing in place.
"If you're doing that, you can see where your fires are, you can get to those fires and you can put them out in a much more targeted way.
"So this is a good sign, that governments now have the strategies in place and are being able to do these things".
"Certainly looking at the numbers Ireland is doing very well - but Ireland is in the same situation as everybody else: keep on at it, it's not the time to rest on your laurels".
"The term really is this virus is taking every opportunity it gets.
"And I think we've had this conversation before: that people unfortunately interpreted the ending of lockdowns as ending of outbreak - it's not the same thing.
"Ending of lockdown is the time when you really have to be most vigilant, and have to take all the measures necessary and keep on doing those things.
"But unfortunately, people relaxed and we're seeing these upticks".
