Digital Desk Staff
An infectious diseases specialist says we should not be satisfied with hundreds of new Covid-19 infections a day.
The national infection rate has remained roughly static after 248 more cases were confirmed last night.
Three additional deaths were also confirmed.
In the South East,
Kilkenny and Wexford identified 7 new cases each, Waterford has 6, Tipperary has 5 while Carlow has less than 5 new infections
The National Public Health Emergency Team's (Nphet) most recent models show the outbreak has stabilised in Ireland and will not dip much lower since restrictions have been eased.
Ireland has the lowest rate of the virus in Europe, with a 14-day incidence rate per 100,000 of 77.6 according to the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention's latest data, but Professor Sam McConkey believes we can still do better.
"Is a public policy that want to accept 300 cases a day and that about one or two people a day might pass away?
"In my view it's a better place to be if we can really control it even better than that and get the number of daily deaths down to zero and the number of daily cases very low, because then more confidently we can control each outbreak."
Elsewhere, the US is gearing up to distribute doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine after it was cleared by the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) on Friday evening.
The EU is due to make a decision the vaccine on December 29th while a verdict on the Moderna vaccine is due in January
