Sunday and other Media Stupid Statements from this week… May 30, 2021
Posted by guestposter in Uncategorized.trackback
Guess who is filled with optimism about the virus. But if we only move on all will be well!
There will undoubtedly be scares in the months ahead as Covid variants are detected but politicians and media need to respond in a calmer and more considered way than they have to date and not inflame public fears at every possible opportunity. People face all sorts of risks in their daily lives and Covid needs to be treated as just one more. After vaccination it has become a more containable risk and Ireland needs to move on unless it wants to be trapped in a cycle of fear from which there is no exit.
Even when businesses open, capacity constraints due to social distancing or an enduring reluctance among some customers to mix indoors will turn the economics of the sector upside down. That negative pressure will be forced to the surface somewhere else in the industry, because it is a closed loop system. Its only escape is through a valve of insolvency opened by impatient creditors.
From the IT editorial during the week on variants…
The longer-term issue is that the emergence of the Indian variant and other mutants, combined with vaccine hesitancy, could make herd immunity – somewhere between 60 and 80 per cent coverage – much more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to attain. For all western governments, the task is two-fold: to get the timing of indoor reopening right so as to deny new variants the chance to spread, and to pull out all the stops to encourage the public to take this life-saving injection.
Is something missing between the first sentence and the second, because the editorial doesn’t expand on the connection with herd immunity or indeed how that links in with the two-fold task.
The vaccine rollout, after a difficult and sluggish start, has certainly turned into a welcome success story and underpinning that goodwill is that desire for our personal liberties to be restored.
That is why it was so disappointing and alarming to see the government seek to extend Covid-19 emergency powers until November and potentially to next February.
The cynic in me says this has less to do with public health and more to do with the desire to expand the nanny state.
Morning Ireland had three mayors on this morning to talk about crowds gathering in city centres over the weekend:: Cork (Fine Gael); Dublin (Greern Party): and Galway (independent).
The contrast between how Hazel Chu (GP) was interviewed and how the other two were interviewed was blatant. Particularly stark was the way Chu, but not Joe Kavanagh (FG)/was challenged about what her party was doing in Government about the issue.
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Yeah, that’s true and disappointing, very typical RTÉ- though I thought Kavanagh was very strong on the need for people to be cautious in the face of the virus.
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[…] on RTÉ this morning various city Mayors. As Tobuktu has noted in comments one got a tough time of it while others didn’t – but notable for how strong the Mayor of […]
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