DUBLIN: Ireland must act now to prevent a damaging return to lockdown, Prime Minister Micheal Martin said on Monday after rejecting a surprise recommendation by his health chiefs to shut down the economy immediately and opting instead to tighten COVID-19 restrictions.
The National Public Health Emergency Team called late on Sunday for a leap to the highest level of coronavirus curbs, Level 5, having told the government as recently as Thursday the current Level 2 status for most of the country was appropriate.
Ministers faced sharp political and business resistance to what would have amounted to Europe’s first major second-wave national lockdown and chose to move the whole country to Level 3, going against their health chiefs’ advice for the first time.
“The most important thing for all of us to understand is what happens next is in our own hands,” Martin said in a televised address, saying some businesses may not be able to recover from a reimposition of more severe restrictions.
“If we all act now, we can stop the need to go further.”
While Ireland reported the highest number of daily cases since late April on Saturday and a similar number on Monday, its 14-day cumulative case total of 104 per 100,000 people is only the 14th highest infection rate among 31 European countries monitored by the European Centre for Disease Control.
But a health official who advised a lockdown said that with one of the lowest intensive-care unit (ICU) capacities among the advanced economies of the OECD, Ireland may run out of ICU beds in a month on the current trajectory.
Under Level 5, people would have been asked to stay at home, except to exercise within 5 km (3 miles), with only essential retailers allowed to stay open – broadly similar to the initial seven-week lockdown that was among the longest imposed in Europe.
Ireland’s capital, Dublin, and the northwestern county of Donegal shifted to Level 3 over the past two weeks, which bans all indoor restaurant dining.
Those tighter local restrictions have kept the unemployment rate just below 15%, although the large multinational sector and exports in less-affected sectors have shielded the economy from the worst of the crisis.
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