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There is a widespread opinion within the government that Tony Holohan wants to keep the country at Level 5 until at least mid-December.
The medical director has not said this, either in public or in private, but the top officials who have engaged with him in recent days have no doubts about what they think he thinks.
“That would be his opinion, there is no doubt about that,” said one, while another source was more forceful: “Nphet wants the country to close until there is a vaccine.”
This contributed in part to a tense exchange of views at a meeting of the Covid-19 oversight group, made up of department secretaries-general, chiefs of staff of Coalition leaders, and senior public health officials, earlier in the year. last week.
Two sources with knowledge of the discussions report that the top state official, Martin Fraser, “cut off the head” of Dr. Holohan. “Tony didn’t give up, he’s waterproof,” said one.
Others say it wasn’t that dramatic. “They are two stubborn and stubborn people. I wouldn’t read too much,” insisted a third source.
The tensions between the government and Nphet is not a new story. In May, ministers privately complained that Dr. Holohan had accumulated so much influence and dominance over the public and politicians that he had become, as one cabinet minister put it at the time, “the most powerful person in the world. history of Irish public life. “.
Covid’s oversight group was established to effectively dilute that power, as well as to address issues that had arisen when Nphet recommended policies that public officials and politicians viewed as impractical to implement. One view now held by many of the group’s officials is that Level 5 has made no difference except to cause widespread economic damage and devastation at a combined cost to the Treasury of some € 1.5 billion and rising.
One senior official argued: “Cases dropped considerably with Level 3 and restrictions on home visits and then when we got to Level 5, there was no real change in the trajectory of the disease.”
It’s not that everyone is unhappy with Holohan – “everyone has respect for Tony,” insists one critic – but there is frustration with what officials believe is Nphet’s failure to back up his claim that the Level 5 was necessary to change people’s behavior and limit contacts with real data and evidence.
“The anticipatory: for people to change their behavior in anticipation of Level 5, that’s silly. There is no evidence of that,” says another particularly strong critic of the blockade.
Despite the apparent grudge, most in the system consider the ongoing debate and the inevitable tension it is causing to be ultimately a good thing. “We didn’t have a lot of fucking debates before 2008,” said one shock-era veteran.
The departments of Taoiseach, Finance and Public Expenditure have been accumulating a large amount of data in recent weeks that, according to government sources, overwhelmingly supports the idea that Level 3 measures, combined with the ban on home visits, they work and is what will work next. month.
“It is going to be a very forensic examination of the data, what is contributing to the spread of the virus and as far as possible eliminate that activity and open up the economy,” said one of the officials involved.
This was happening even before the current lockdown started. E-mails obtained by Sunday Independent record Dr Orlaigh Quinn, the top official in Leo Varadkar’s department, telling Fraser, Varadkar’s chief of staff Brian Murphy and others in mid-September that he understood “that there is no evidence of an increase in claims “for Covid disease benefits from the restaurant and hospitality sector.
“If community transmission is coming from those who use the restaurant / hospitality sector, we would expect to see it in those workforces,” he wrote.
The government hopes to be able to release some of the data it has been accumulating in recent weeks to bolster its case for easing restrictions in the face of considerable discomfort, not just from Nphet but from a wide range of health expert commentators.
The mantra, repeated ad nauseam throughout the political system now, is that Nphet will advise, but the government will decide.
In that sense, the Coalition made a deliberate but little-noticed decision last month not to agree publicly, or indeed privately, with Nphet’s definition of success, which was to get the virus’s reproduction rate, the R0 , out of 0.5 and the number of cases to about 100 new cases per day.
With the number of cases still above 400 some days last week, the hope among ministers, and everyone else, of course, is that they can reduce cases by the region of 200 per day over the next ten days.
“Being in the 200 is a very different image than the 400,” said a senior government source.
Big decisions will be made this week. While the talks are ongoing this weekend and will continue for the next few days, the government hopes to be able to announce the reintroduction of many Level 3 measures starting on December 2, the week of Wednesday, while the ban on home visits continues. and out-of-county travel.
The initial priorities are to open stores, gyms and churches. Hairdressers, estheticians, and barbers can also open on Level 3. The retail sector is a particular focus, with the government keen to respond to pent-up consumer demand in the run-up to Christmas.
“There is no reason why retail should not happen, the economic consequences of it are not worth thinking about,” said a cabinet minister.
State Minister Damien English, who has responsibility for the retail sector, has been coordinating with local authorities to allow longer opening hours for stores and to maximize space in city centers and cities to facilitate distancing Social.
As long as the Covid case numbers remain stable, these are the easiest decisions for the government. The most difficult are what to do with pubs, restaurants, cafes and bars. Ministers are extremely pessimistic about the prospect of allowing so-called wet pubs to open at Christmas. “I really don’t think so,” a source centrally involved in the reopening plan said yesterday.
This weekend the possibility of eating indoors in controlled environments such as restaurants and gastronomic pubs with table service is being discussed, but a final decision has not been made. “If I called him now I’d think it’s 50:50 but maybe more in favor of them opening on the grounds that if that doesn’t happen, people will just have events at home,” said a senior official.
The widely ridiculed € 9 food rule can be reconfigured, and senior government figures acknowledge that there must be a better distinction between wet and dry pubs.
“We need to be able to distinguish between legitimate restaurants and pubs,” said the source centrally involved in the plan. Among the ideas being thrown is whether certain conditions around kitchen size or seating plans should be tied to whether a pub can reopen.
The ban on home visits is likely to continue for at least the first two weeks of December. But as reported during the week in the Irish Independent, the government will relax the rules on home visiting and travel out of counties during Christmas week.
Guidelines will be issued to the public to keep gatherings small and take precautions such as ensuring adequate ventilation in the home, masks, and social distancing. One source said the guide may be to hold meetings as small as six people and advice to quarantine or get tested if visiting older or more vulnerable relatives.
But ministers are also keen not to be overly prescriptive, with a primary focus, already publicly articulated by the Taoiseach last week, on individuals exercising personal responsibility.
“We have to advise on how to have a safe Christmas, what to avoid, how to protect all generations,” said a source close to Micheál Martin.
“What people really do is up to them. We can’t legislate for everything. People are smart, they know what to do to protect themselves.”
The guideline for people wanting to fly home is likely to remain the same as it is today: that they should avoid non-essential travel, but if they do travel home, follow the new EU-wide traffic light system, which for many means shorter periods of isolation and get tested.
What happens after Christmas is far from clear, but the government hopes that, as long as the number of cases remains stable, it will keep the state at Level 3 in the new year. It is not clear whether the relaxation of the home visiting ban for Christmas week will continue into the new year. But its reimposition is likely if the number of cases increases after the holidays.
Towards the end of January, the Government now hopes to have sufficient stocks of a vaccine to begin the process of, in the first instance, the inoculation of health and vulnerable workers.
On Friday, the Taoiseach noted that regulatory approval from the European Medicines Agency for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines could come in the second half of December.
“I think there is a great possibility that the vaccine will arrive in December and land in Ireland in January,” said a cabinet source. “It is possible that many of the at-risk groups were vaccinated in the first trimester.”
Vaccines will require a distribution system, a computer system, consent forms, and a state compensation plan. The HSE and the Department of Health will take care of this, and a lot of work has already started.
Former DCU President Professor Brian MacCraith will convene a meeting of the Government’s Vaccine Task Force this week and told RTÉ yesterday that an inoculation strategy will be addressed “urgently and comprehensively.”
A senior government figure sees Professor MacCraith’s role as keeping the HSE and the Health Department on their toes. Another insider involved in many of the key discussions taking place in recent weeks optimistically predicts: “This will all end in the summer. We will talk about something else.”
Another, however, warns that the consequences of this dire year will be felt for some time, noting that the country has been divided between those whose income has been destroyed by the pandemic and those who have remained financially stable.
“The division in 2010 was public versus private, it’s not like that,” they say.
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