Restrict contacts now if visiting vulnerable over Christmas, Government says

People must restrict their movements immediately and avoid socialising if they want to spend time with people vulnerable to Covid-19 over Christmas, a senior Government official said.

To avoid another spike of the virus over the festive period, Liz Canavan, assistant secretary at the Department of Taoiseach, urged people to limit their contacts to "a very small circle", prioritise activities around a "small, close group" and "choose only those who are really important to you."

She described the coming weeks as “the next big challenge” and warned against undoing the efforts of the past two months to suppress the virus by having a safe Christmas.

“With two weeks to go from today, remember that if you have to plan spending time with people who are vulnerable to Covid-19 over Christmas, you should be restricting your movements from now,” Ms Canavan said at the Government’s regular Covid-19 briefing.

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“It won’t be sufficient to start reducing your contacts in the couple of days before Christmas. That means you might have to postpone that meal with friends until after Christmas and it will mean avoiding crowds.”

She cautioned against people gathering and travelling for Christmas, pointing to the increase in the number of coronavirus infections in the United States and Canada with an increase of 30 per cent in Chicago from people travelling and mixing over the Thanksgiving holidays last month.

“Let’s learn the lessons from other countries and be determined not to repeat what happened there,” she said.

Vaccine

The Government official said that it had been "a very encouraging week" seeing "a grandmother from Fermanagh" Margaret Keenan being the first to be vaccinated in the UK.

But she said the vaccines will be delivered “in stages” and it will “take time to vaccinate everyone” so people should continue to take actions to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

The taskforce on the vaccination programme, chaired by Prof Brian MacCraith, will report to Government on the plan on Friday and it will be considered by Cabinet on Tuesday.

“We are getting closer to a point where we will be able to receive the vaccine and get back to some kind of normality but until then we must stay the course. We are not quite there yet and we don’t want to undo all we have achieved in managing the second wave,” she said.

Shopping

Ms Canavan advised people to follow basic health guidelines, including wearing a mask in crowded places such as in busy outdoors spaces like shopping streets and queues.

“Our actions and decisions in these weeks in the run-up to Christmas are crucial in ensuring that we can have a meaningful and safe festive period with family and friends,” she said.

“Every contact counts.”

She asked people to consider shopping at quieter times earlier or later in the day. She reported that Dublin city centre had its busiest weekend since March last weekend and that the busiest time of day was between 2pm and 3pm while the quietest was between 9am and 10am.

Traffic volumes around some of the big Dublin shopping centres was 40 per cent higher last weekend than the previous weekend with the quietest times being between 8am and 11am.

On socialising, Dublin city centre was 80 per cent busier last Saturday night than the previous Saturday. She urged people to think about planning meals out on a week night instead.

Ms Canavan said that since the easing of the Level 5 government restrictions the number of people claiming the Pandemic Unemployment Payment had fallen by 25,000.

PUP recipients registered as unemployed on one or more days between September 27th and December 3rd and in receipt of the payment for at least 17 weeks were among 1.6 million people to receive the State Christmas payment, equal to an extra week’s pay, on Tuesday.