‘From April 19, we will slowly defrost economy’: minister
20:49
From 19 April we will slowly defrost the economy, Łukasz Szumowski, the Polish health minister has said. At the same time, he emphasized that isolation is effective and if it wasn’t for the social distancing and other draconian measures, the number of patients would be much higher.
“We will be defrosting the economy slowly from [April] 19. I think this is good news if we look at the value of the cost of this lockdown,” said Szumowski in an interview on April 14 for RMF FM, a private Polish broadcaster. “If it weren’t for the restrictions, we would have tens of thousands of patients today,” he claimed.
On April 9, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced that after Easter, the government will present a plan to return to the “new economic reality”. He emphasized that the plan would be “very logical, orderly, discussed with experts in health, economy and social affairs”.
Szumowski also informed that he was waiting for an assessment by the Chief Sanitary Inspectorate (GIS) of the correspondence election procedure and would present his recommendations this week. He claimed that in Poland it is now possible to carry out 20,000 coronavirus tests daily.
Meanwhile, Piotr Müller, a Polish government spokesperson, has said that decisions on “loosening” economic restrictions will be taken on April 15 and 16, adding that it would depend on the data from and after Easter. He told Polish Radio, a state-run broadcaster, on April 14, that the first restrictions are to be placed on the limits of people in stores.
