Irish PM says good chance social distancing rule can be relaxed
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar raised the prospect on Friday of halving social distancing rules from two metres to one if the rate of coronavirus infections comes down further in a potential boost to still shuttered restaurants and pubs.
“Before we can relax that rule and maybe reduce it to 1 (metre), which I know a lot of people would like, we just need to see the virus come down a bit more. We’re not at that point yet but I think there’s a good chance we get there, just not quite yet,” Varadkar told Ireland’s FM104 radio station.
The daily number of new COVID-19 cases has stayed below 100 for 13 of the last 14 days and the so-called “reproduction rate” narrowed further to 0.4 to 0.5 this week, a trend the country’s top epidemiologist described as “astonishingly stable.”