They’ve gone a bit quiet…

…the IT soft denialists. A brief spurt of activity late last week talking about unfair retrospective analysis seems to have slumped into silence as the numbers have ramped upwards. It is a difficult corner to argue somehow there’s fault in finding that the situation is worse than the very bad predictions that were made by public health officials and others, against their own rhetoric of ‘reopening’. Unconvincing many would say. Unfortunately for them no lesser person than WHO’s Mike Ryan had this to say:

Emergencies chief Mike Ryan told reporters he had spoken to chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan on Monday to discuss the situation, which has seen Ireland become the world’s worst pandemic hotspot. “My own country in Ireland . . . has suffered one of the most acute increases in disease incidence of any country in the world,” the Mayo man said. “And not due to the variant let me add, but due to increased social mixing and reduction of physical distancing,” he said. “New variant strains . . . have not been the driver of new transmission.”

There goes another excuse for the soft denialists and parts of the Government.

Another WHO expert noted:

WHO infectious disease epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said countries such as Ireland had seen “near vertical” exponential growth in cases due to mixing over Christmas and New Year.

Meanwhile in Germany:

German chancellor Angela Merkel has told politicians in her conservative party that she expects a lockdown in Germany to curb the spread of the coronavirus to last until the start of April, top-selling newspaper Bid daily cited participants at the meeting as saying.

And today comes news that:

Health workers who are deemed close contacts, but who are not showing symptoms of Covid-19, have been called back to work in the health service.Health Service Executive Chief Operations Officer Anne O’Connor said that asymptomatic close contacts were being monitored while at work by occupational health experts. She said the decision was made due to the shortage of healthcare workers. It comes as pressure on the acute hospital system from Covid-19 continues to increase, with 160 patients now in intensive care.

But how can this be happening when we were told it was necessary to reopen the economy, that concerns were overblown, that (a certain Pat Leahy assured us) the virus seemed less virulent?

This is a human disaster, and there’s no pleasure at all in writing about it. I know a raft of people who have been impacted negatively by Covid-19 with ailments ranging from impaired senses through to serious long term cardiac issues and these are people in the 20-50 age range, with most in the 20-40 category, and I know people who have lost loved ones. So there’s no glee in this, just sheer unadulterated frustration at a situation which was – at least to some extent – avoidable.

Why focus on Government and parts of the media? Because one had authority and the other had the power of influence. It has been mystifying for me to see the former bend under commercial and other pressures, to see the other make no efforts to clean out denialists and disinformation peddlers in comments sections and allow space for same in guest columns as well as from some regular commenters allow frankly disgraceful attacks on NPHET and public health people. To say this has been a relinquishing of responsibility is too kind. There have been clear effects.

But all this too at a time when polling data was clear that the population as a whole had a clear and very very strong majority in favour of difficult restrictions to contain the virus. It’s interesting to see some of the IT soft deniers quote a single poll here and there (one Amarach poll has been dragged out) but time and again RedC and B&A polls demonstrated up to 80% support for constraints throughout the Autumn. And indeed for more constraints – not for their own sake, but for the protection of the society.

To go against that grain tells us much about how difficult decisions are actually made and by and for whom. No one has argued against supports for businesses shuttered during this period. Anything but. They will be an essential part of the mix as some sort of new normal is achieved. But the continuing champing at the bit, the inability of the state to actually say that it was far far too premature for them to reopen, the unwillingness to state this message clearly. Not good enough, not nearly good enough when we are talking about human life. And we have a situation where those who have adhered to public health guidance throughout – who have across the best part of a year kept interactions to the bare minimum, have sought to protect others and themselves, have seen an almost wilful disregard for that care and worse others wasting that effort. Again, not good enough.