The HSE is to start testing nursing home residents living where no Covid-19 clusters have been found.
Yesterday saw the country's highest number of deaths in a single day recorded, with a further 41 people losing their lives after being infected with the virus.
406 people have now died, while there are 11,479 confirmed Covid-19 cases.
187 of the deaths occurred in nursing homes.
Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tony Holohan, says his team is trying to stop the virus getting into nursing homes in the first place:
"One of the things that we did look at was the importance of maybe moving to try and do some sampling work in other nursing home settings that haven't identified clusters, so that we can maybe proactively try and identify if this virus is in other settings.
"As we've said all along, one of the things we want to do as much as we can is prevent this infection from getting into nursing homes that haven't yet got any identified cases."
