Published Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Almost 50,000 people have applied for financial help due to covid-19 crisis

By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

On the first day of operation for proteger.go.cr, a web platform created for citizens and residents to request financial help from the government due to the covid-19 emergency, 48,808 people were registered, reported the government.

The so-called Proteger bonus is an economic aid for people affected in their place of employment by suspension of operations imposed by the government as part of the precautionary measures to contain the expansion of covid-19.

According to the statistics provided by the government, after this financial aid was announced by President Carlos Alvarado, the site proteger.go.cr received a total of 1,726,953 visits.

Of the total visits, 54% were men and 46% women. Visitors visited the site mostly by cell phone (87%), 12% via computer and 1% via tablet, reported the government.

"Since the launch of the site we had a large visiting of people who wanted to fill out the form to opt for the Proteger bonus," said Geannina Dinarte, minister of Labor. "At this time we have more than 48 thousand requests that are being analyzed by the system and the work team. They will be notified in the next few hours."

According to Dinarte, on the first day the website was made public it crashed because of high traffic. After solving the problem, the site is expected to operate normally.

To keep the site up and available with high traffic, it was increased by 5 gigabytes and the number of servers tripled to 48, the government said.

The government allocated 296 billion colones to grant subsidies of between 62,500 and 125,000 colones for laid-off workers and those whose working hours were reduced or contracts suspended, due to the coronavirus emergency.

The financial aid will be paid to the beneficiaries for three months.

The authorities of the Ministry of Labor alerted the public about people who have wanted to take advantage of the Proteger bonus and are charging to enter the site and do the process.

The application process is free, it does not require intermediaries, and it does not require presenting documents authenticated by lawyers.

The ministry announced that it is in the process of investigating the origin of the alleged crooked intermediaries that charge for application assistance.







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