Thank you for the question.
To give you the sense of what we were facing, on March 13—that was the Friday before the crisis—we had a typical number of EI claims. There were about 9,000 claims that day. By Monday, the 16th, we'd hit 71,000 claims. To put that in perspective, that was almost double the record we had during the global financial crisis of 38,000 claims in a single day. By March 21, that had grown to 266,000 claims in a single day. That was 35 times our normal rate, and seven times the record we'd ever achieved.
After March 16, when we realized we had a catastrophic challenge in terms of the volume that was going to come in and our inability to process that volume on a timely basis, given the way the system is built, that's when the team built the system to allow us to move to a flat payment and automatically transfer all of those people—what became roughly two and a half million people by the end of March—from the EI system and automatically have them paid through the EI side of the CERB.
We did our first system run April 1—it may have been April 2—in the early, early morning hours. As you said, it was a few thousand. We had a confidence that we could do about half a million a day.
Minister Qualtrough gave a press conference the next day indicating she had confidence that we'd be able to do that. The system actually slightly exceeded expectations. We were processing about 600,000 a day. By the end of that first week, we'd processed most of the 2.23 million. That was just before the CERB had launched for the non-EI eligible people on the CRA side.