“We have closed the borders because most cases of infection come from abroad,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in an interview with the US broadcaster on Thursday.
He added, however, that the peak of the outbreak was likely still ahead and that Poland “will have several thousand, if not more,” Covid-19 cases.
'Earthquake' for economy
He told CNN’s Richard Quest that the coronavirus crisis was “a real earthquake” for the Polish economy.
“Right now we are fighting the coronavirus from the point of view of our healthcare system, not letting new cases into Poland,” Morawiecki said during the interview.
“That is why we were the first country in Europe to introduce so-called sanitary border controls, and they have helped us slow down the inflow of new cases into Poland, but on top of that we are introducing many other measures.”
Morawiecki said during the interview on CNN International's "Quest Means Business" that Poland instituted border controls “because we know that most of the cases are coming from abroad—Italy, Spain and other countries in the western part of the European Union.”
He said border controls “have helped us put more people into quarantine and to slow down the process.”
'Restrictive measures' producing results
“We have introduced quite restrictive measures compared to the other countries of the EU, and they seem to be quite effective,” he said, adding that Poland had fewer cases than many other countries.
He told CNN that Poland has closed facilities such as pubs and clubs and also “stopped schools and kindergartens, so the whole country is, so to say, frozen, which is very detrimental to our economy, but this is very much needed … for a couple of weeks, with the hope that later on we will be able to very quickly reestablish the linkages of the supply chain and production chains, and we will do this.”
'Bold plan' to save jobs, 'preserve capacity' of firms
Morawiecki also told Quest that the crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic was completely different from the 2008 financial crisis because "it is breaking the real fabric between different supply chains” and harming the economy “in a Schumpeterian way.”
“So this is why we have introduced a very bold plan, a very effective and important one," Morawiecki said. "It’s a plan of a size … close to 10 percent of our GDP, and it includes a safety net for workers” in order to save jobs and “preserve the capacity of the companies to bounce back” once the crisis subsides.
Under the plan, "up to 40 percent of the salary of an employee will be reimbursed to the company from the state budget," Morawiecki added.
Poland has declared a state of "epidemic emergency" and temporarily closed its borders to non-residents on Sunday as part of efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Poland’s authorities on Wednesday unveiled a PLN 212 billion (EUR 47 billion, USD 52 billion) stimulus package to shore up the economy and shield the country from the impact of an intensifying coronavirus outbreak.
A total of 355 people have tested positive for the Covid-19 disease in Poland, with five deaths from the coronavirus so far, health authorities said on Thursday.
(gs/pk)
Source: PAP, CNN