Leo Cullen has confirmed he is one of those in the Leinster camp who tested positive for Covid-19 recently, but said he expects to be out of self-isolation before their United Rugby Championship meeting with Ulster on Saturday.
The head coach spent his Christmas in isolation following the positive test, but says he has thankfully only experienced "very, very mild symptoms".
And while they have also lost some members of their squad in recent days due to being close contacts of cases, they are "slowly but surely" emerging from the crisis which saw their facility shut down last week, and their St Stephen's Day derby with Munster portponed.
"Omicron is very different to what we experienced before," Cullen said.
"We have had a number of players and staff, myself included, who have picked up Omicron and have had different periods of isolation.
"I don't want to trivialise this in any way but from my own personal experience having come through it now, I was OK. Very, very mild symptoms to the point where only the fact that you're testing (positive), I wouldn't have really known is the honest answer."
The province remain hopeful they will be cleared to take on Ulster in this Saturday's United Rugby Championship clash in Belfast, with the northern province also dealing with an outbreak which saw their St Stephen's Day meeting with Connacht postponed.
While Cullen is among several players and staff still isolating, he says they are welcoming more and more players and staff back to training in UCD as the week progresses.
"The picture is... it's not amazing if you were to say this would be the situation we're in a number of weeks ago, but we're slowly but surely getting through it now.
"Everyone has had their challenges is the reality. We've had a good chunk of cases, I'm not going to go into specifics on numbers, we can maybe at some point in the future but obviously because we're testing even today and I can't tell you the full results of those tests because the guys that haven't got their results back yet, aren't allowed to come in yet.
"But hopefully we'll have a good chunk of players that have either tested positive previously and are back training now or have tested negative already this morning and are going to rejoin the squad."
The province are also hopeful that "common sense" prevails over the EPCR's decision to award Montpellier a 28-0 win for their cancelled Heineken Champions Cup meeting earlier this month.
"You hope that common sense will prevail and that people who have had games cancelled get an opportunity to play them."
Leinster reacted angrily to the cancellation of the fixture, and their frustrations were heightened by the decision to postpone several other games on the same weekend, following heightened travel restrictions between France and the UK.
Cullen confirmed that there is no official "appeals" process involved, but that they are expecting the tournament organisers to make changes to the remaining competition format.
"You hope that common sense will prevail and that people who have had games cancelled get an opportunity to play them.
"The good thing is that there are still seven weekends of European action left, so how Europe goes about reconfiguring the tournament, we'll wait and see.
"They're working away in the background, I believe, but you'd hope that some level of common sense will prevail and everyone gets a fair crack at trying to play the games because at the end of the day, Covid is going to hit everyone at various different stages, particularly with this variant.
"You see across the Top 14, URC, Premiership - everyone is having games not being played over the course of the last few weekends. It really just depends when it hits, rather than if it hits. Everyone is going to be affected at some point, so that would be the hope."
