The government is finalising the details of a massive wage subsidy scheme, with the state paying up to 75% of the wages of workers who are laid off due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Paschal Donohoe, the finance minister, is studying a wage subsidy scheme launched in Denmark on March 14 where the state reimburses companies 75% of the wages of workers who would otherwise be laid off, up to a cap of about 23,000 Danish kroner (€3,000) per month. The Danish scheme applies only to employees of private firms that face more than 50 job losses or redundancies of up to 30% of the workforce.
The income support plan, to be announced early this week, is designed to prevent a deep recession by keeping hundreds of thousands of workers “on the books” with their current employers, leaving the Irish economy better able to respond when infection restrictions are eased.
Britain has announced a plan to subsidise up to 80% of threatened pay packets up to a ceiling of £2,500 (€2,700) a month while Ibec, the business lobby group, has called for a €4bn package to pay up to 70% of net wages for 500,000 workers over 20 weeks. Sinn Fein has proposed wage guarantees up to €525 a week at a net cost of about €5bn.
Regina Doherty, the social protection minister, said yesterday the government was not expecting people to live on the €203-a-week coronavirus emergency benefit indefinitely. “We now recognise that we will have to do something much different,” she told RTE Radio. “We are working on it since Thursday . . . and I hope in the next number of days the minister for finance will be able to make an announcement of what it will be.”
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Government sources indicated that a nationwide lockdown of citizens in their homes was not being contemplated but some regional restrictions could be implemented this week. This could include the suspension of public transport, or the closure of non-essential businesses in certain towns and cities where clusters of Covid-19 appear to be increasing.
Last night the Health Protection Surveillance Centre said there had been 102 new confirmed cases in the previous day, bringing the total to 785.
RTE confirmed that a person at the station had tested positive. “Importantly this person is safe and well at home and is following the HSE guidelines for self-isolation,” it said.
The government is ramping up contact tracing, and by the end of this week it will have more than 800 staff deployed to track down people believed to have been in contact with a person infected with Covid-19. The personnel are working out of the Curragh army barracks, Health Information and Quality Authority offices in Dublin and Cork, UCD, DCU and the Revenue offices in Dublin. Staff will join the effort in UCC, NUIG and Revenue’s Limerick office this week.
Government is expecting 1,300 confirmed cases of Covid-19 to have been diagnosed some time this week, and these will generate an estimated 40,000 close contacts who will need to be tracked down and advised to self-isolate for 14 days.
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The HSE said the number of contacts per case being traced had fallen from 36 in the early weeks. It said: “As we no longer call casual contacts, and social distancing has been implemented, the average number has reduced to between 15 and 20 per confirmed case.”
Simon Harris, the health minister, warned yesterday that pubs which remained open in defiance of the government’s advice would be shut down under new emergency powers signed into law on Friday. “You are letting down the people of this country, and your fellow publicans who are helping out and complying at great difficulty to them and their staff at a very challenging time,” he said.
The Infectious Diseases Society of Ireland said it was concerned about the epidemiological curve of Covid-19 cases in Ireland. “It is our view that further immediate societal measures, implemented by government, are required to stop the spread,” it tweeted.
Paddy Mallon, a past president of the society and consultant in infectious diseases in St Vincent’s Hospital, said that if Ireland was going to take the approach of controlling the virus as was done in South Korea and Singapore, then it needed to act more aggressively early on. “If you don’t, the risk is to the healthcare system, and ours has limited capacity for surging cases. The more you do early, the less that surge becomes,” he said.
“It involves strict interventions and we are not quite sure if that is the government strategy, or is it pursuing a strategy to draw this out over a longer period of time, which is really like the herd immunity thing that the UK were trying, which has never been shown to work.”
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More than 10,000 people in Ireland have now been tested, with new centres opening all the time. Three Irish naval ships are being transformed into floating facilities. The LÉ Eithne will be stationed at Kennedy Quay in Cork. Work is under way to convert the LÉ Samuel Beckett at Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in Dublin. The LÉ William Butler Yeats will be in Galway. Construction has also started on a drive-through testing centre in Tullamore.
Additional reporting: Mark Tighe