Infectious disease expert, Professor McConkey, believes Level 5 restrictions need to continue.
There currently 928 people in hospital with Covid-19 - up 46 in the last 24 hours - while 157 patients are in ICU.
There are currently 42 intensive care beds available in the public system, while 9 hospitals have no spare ICU capacity.
It comes a a further 788 new cases and 17 deaths have been reported.
Professor McConkey says reducing community transmission will help control outbreaks in nursing homes.
"It's about getting the rates down in the community. People in nursing homes and vulnerable people requite healthy young people to go in and look after them.
"If there's very high rates in the community it's essentially very very difficult to prevent outbreaks in nursing homes.
"So it's about controlling Covid in our country, and not having very high rates in the general population."
