Ireland's third wave of Covid-19 is "clearly bigger than the second wave".
That's the warning from a leading infectious diseases specialist, after officials announced a new record number of cases.
There's 1,296 new cases of the virus and six more patients have died.
Professor Sam McConkey says we need to double down on a national effort to drive out this virus.
"Everyone starting to feel that optimism and hope of the coronavirus vaccine coming - that's all great, this turning is happening.
"But I think at the same time as al that we are in the middle of a very brisk third wave that's clearly bigger than the second wave.
"It's clearly worse than we were back in October, so we do need this cohesive action again".
Prof McConkey says the outbreak could only be called "stable" here if we were seeing under 10 cases a day.
"So I'd like to see that we get down to a really stable place of tiny numbers - let's say single digit numbers in our country - because then it's possible to keep it down for many, many months with traditional outbreak investigation, contact tracing and public health support and expertise.
"Whereas it's very unstable as we've seen - in early December the numbers were around 200 or 300 - but that's not a stable place to sit at at all, it just rapidly jumps up".
