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The desire to be vindicated is a natural human urge. Who doesn’t want to be proven right, especially on matters of public controversy? This is true even during a devastating pandemic.
The government decided in December to reopen stores and indoor dining rooms under social distancing rules, while allowing more domestic mixes closer to Christmas. He departed from Nphet’s advice to proceed with more caution. Many other doctors and scientists also criticized the decision at the time, while many business lobby groups supported it to varying degrees.
The decision was followed by an almost vertical increase in infection that threatens the health of the most vulnerable. Many of our family, friends, and neighbors will get sick from Covid-19 this month and some will die. That solemn fact matters much more at this time than a debate on the wisdom of the government’s decision. But since we are all human, that debate has inevitably arisen.
To properly judge the decision to diverge from Nphet’s advice on financial grounds, it must be seen in the context of when it was made. Nphet’s street cred at the time was not helped by the fact that the tough six-week lockdown he was seeking for October and November had not produced anything close to the improvement in infection rates that was promised.
People were exhausted. Amárach’s investigation for the State supports the conclusion that, at that time, more people accepted the decision to reopen than were dissatisfied because it was too risky. Despite the suggestions to the contrary from the sources of wisdom that populate social networks, this seems incontrovertible to me. The data is on the Department of Health website; only a third of people wanted deeper restrictions by the end of November. Dissatisfaction only came later when things fell apart.
Defending jobs
The government made an understandable attempt to defend jobs and make room to ease pressure on people’s mental health. Even its most ardent critics would not argue that politicians set out to harm people. If they do, they are not arguing in good faith. Politicians are not monsters. No human being with a shred of integrity or compassion would have supported the reopening of the economy to the extent that it was had they known, or been warned, that it was going to contribute 5,000 cases a day by the first weekend of January. . No one predicted this.
Stores are not a source of widespread infection and there is little credible evidence to the contrary. The real issue at stake here is the decision to reopen the indoor dining room. It is currently unclear to what extent this is directly responsible for the current increase, compared to the general irresponsibility of people while mixing at home and the as yet unknown impact of the newest most transmissible variant of the virus in the UK.
It’s hard for me to accept that just 20 days of indoor dining is what has brought the country’s health infrastructure to its knees. Nphet suggests that the new UK variant may be responsible for only 10 percent of cases, but this is based on a small sample. I find it incongruous to suggest that the new variant that is ravaging our closest neighbor, with whom we have inextricable physical ties, is not an important factor here either. But people better qualified than me will resolve that argument later.
The extent of the hospitality guilt for the current situation has never really been reflected in the group’s data. But, given the risks associated with people mixing indoors without masks, it has clearly played some role, and perhaps even an important one. Only a one-eyed ideologue would deny it. I supported the decision to reopen the indoor dining room because I felt compelled to speak on behalf of the tens of thousands of workers and SME owners whose livelihoods were being thrown into the stake by restrictions designed or supported by full-wage, working people. From home, they were facing no such financial insecurity.
It’s probably fair to say that many people, perhaps even most, could have agreed to the continued closure of indoor dining rooms in November if the government sold them as a critical measure.
But there is the tyranny of the majority. There is little evidence that the majority of those unaffected by the ongoing hospitality closure had a lot of difficulty with it. There is much evidence that the tens of thousands of people directly affected and their families were being harmed. Those people weren’t okay, Jack. My sense of compassion for them remains intact, even now.
Hindsight understanding
But it is obvious that the decision to reopen the indoor dining room has contributed in some way to what is happening now. So, with the benefit of hindsight, you can argue that the decision to reopen all indoor dining rooms as of December 4 may have been wrong. So it must follow that I, along with many others, could have been wrong in supporting him. Personally, I felt the pain of Covid-19 and I do not wish it on anyone, and certainly not as the price of a night out.
Economic considerations will come back later, but for the moment, they should take a back seat. The time has come for all of us to accept that we are in crisis mode and strive with every tendon to once again crush the curve of infection and protect the health and lives of those around us. To do anything now that could put public health at risk would be an act of great moral irresponsibility.
The economy must wait a while until this crisis is contained. If not contained, the economy will be ruined anyway due to a collapse in public confidence. Those of us who care about the economy cannot get around this.
So what do we do after that? We could get by until the vaccines take over. There is also renewed push from proponents of a “Covid zero” policy to mimic the Australian and New Zealand approach. This means taking the pain out of a prolonged draconian lockdown and effectively sealing the nation’s borders as much as possible, to eliminate community transmission and “get back to normal.”
I don’t accept that sealed borders can be described as close to normal for a small, open economy that relies on foreign trade and investment, and that is part of a single market with 26 other nations that we know will take a different approach. .
Ireland would be an outlier in the European Union. The fiscal and economic risks of an atypical status for a small nation like ours cannot simply be discounted. Those risks do not exist to the same degree in Australia and New Zealand.
But while we are squashing the curve anyway for the next few weeks, there is time for us to air these issues further. Let’s have this discussion, calmly, and knowing that the imminent arrival of vaccines means that whatever is decided, we will not be lost forever in this pit of despair.
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