The Health Service Executive has confirmed that contact tracing can be ramped up to handle 3,000 newly confirmed cases per day.
This model would support the testing of 15,000 samples each day, where the positivity rate is 20%.
So far, 1,700 people have been trained to carry out this vital task in a pandemic, but the number working on this each day varies due to demand.
On the busiest day to date, the HSE says that more than 1,400 people were notified of their positive Covid-19 diagnosis, and had their close contacts identified and called.
This resulted in more than 5,000 phone calls being made in one day.
Contact tracing and increased laboratory testing capacity will be a key consideration for public health officials, when assessing whether any current restrictions could be eased or lifted on 5 May.
However, the Taoiseach has said that "we're not there yet" with regards to these two important elements.
Professor Luke O'Neill, an immunologist at Trinity College Dublin, said that both of these elements are "essential for the lockdown to be relieved".
"The big worry is what we call a second surge, or an epidemic yo-yo, because it goes up and down again," he said.
"What happens is, you let people out, there's still a cluster of infection somewhere that we don't know about, and suddenly it starts to spread again and the numbers climb and we're all locked up again. That's unimaginable", he said.
Professor O'Neill said that the testing and tracing means we can identify those infected, their close contacts and then have a "more restricted lockdown" for just those people.
So far, more than 111,000 Covid-19 tests have been completed since this crisis began.
Ireland now has the capacity to do around 10,000 laboratory tests every day. However, with the virus somewhat suppressed in the community, officials say that referrals for testing are now down to about 1,300-1,500 per day.
Instead, this spare capacity is being used to analyse samples taken from the staff and residents in nursing homes and long-term residential care units around the country.
The National Ambulance Service began this large scale swabbing operation on Friday.
Today, Dr Cillian De Gascun of the National Virus Reference Laboratory said that he hopes to see these tests to be completed "by the end of next weekend".
Dr De Gascun said that around 2,000 samples per day are being sent through to labs from this process.
It had been anticipated that the case definition for testing would be broadened by the end of this week, and come into effect next week.
Dr De Gascun said he thinks a "significant portion" of the laboratory testing of those in residential care settings will need to be completed before this can happen.
"Before we broaden the case definition, we would certainly like to see the majority of the nursing home work gone through. Just because we don't want to get into a similar situation as we've seen in the past, where we have a huge number of samples coming into the system and we don't have the laboratory capacity to process them", he said.
Ramping up testing has hit a number of speed bumps along the way, including shortages of testing kits and the availability or reagents.
Dr De Gascun said today that new "platforms" for testing have been introduced in some hospitals and at the National Virus Reference Laboratory, so that everyone is not using the same mechanism and therefore pulling on the same supply chain.
