Róisín Ingle: We ‘saved Christmas’. Let’s not do the same at Easter

An email arrived recently from a reader, let’s call him Mick, complaining that I was writing too much about the pandemic.

“I know we can’t ignore it,” said Mick, “but are we pandering to the pandemic too much? Has it become the skeleton on which you hang your every column?”

And then, came Mick’s damning, rhetorical question:

“Have you,” he asked “become Pandemic Rosie?”

Is paying someone to clean your house the last word in middle-class privilege?

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I’ve been called much worse over the years, but while on a recent break from work I decided to ruminate on Mick’s assertion. In between lying on the sofa watching Bridgerton – which my children have pointedly renamed Bingerton – and lying on the sofa eating many, many varieties of cheese, I took a forensic look back over my columns in 2020.

It turned out Mick was not wrong. Since last March, I reckon I have written about living through this pandemic in every single column except one. That tiny morsel of non-pandemic content was objected to in the strongest terms by my mother, who WhatsApped immediately to say she didn’t approve of my straying away from writing about the current unpleasantness.

As dutifully as a tightly corseted daughter in a dangerously addictive Netflix period drama, I immediately resumed writing plague-adjacent missives. And it has been that way ever since.

“Can you do a column without the thing getting a mention?” Mick challenged me, unaware of my mother’s firm position on the matter. No, it appears I cannot.

In fairness, Mick and I have a lot in common. He is sick of hearing about the pandemic. So am I. I'm sick, for just one current example, of running a remote learning facility and I've only been doing it for three days. I'm going to stick my neck out here and suggest we are all sick of the pandemic as well as, in larger numbers than ever before, actually being sick with it.

Frazzled healthcare workers

There are several thousand new cases each day now with more than 1,500 people with the virus in hospital, putting ever more strain on an already creaking health service and our increasingly frazzled healthcare workers. Thousands have lost their jobs. Still more are hanging, economically or mentally, by a thread. The vaccine is here but even the most optimistic predictions suggest it will be very late in 2021 before enough of us can get it in the kinds of numbers needed to allow for return to the normality we crave.

Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But here we are again. We “saved Christmas” and ended up in the deepest crisis we’ve experienced since March. The way we are going, after lockdown 3 is partially lifted (you know, to “save Easter”) we’ll have another surge of cases followed by lockdown 4 and when that’s lifted a little bit (to “save the summer holliers”) we’ll have another surge followed, inevitably, by lockdown 5.

If only there was another, more constructive, less frustrating way to spend this year. Some people believe there is.

The zero-Covid approach, the strategy to eliminate community transmission of the virus pursued successfully in countries such as New Zealand, Australia and Vietnam, is something many smart, passionate and well-informed people such as Dr Tomás Ryan, Prof Anthony Staines, Prof Gabriel Scally, Prof Sam McConkey, Prof Patricia Kearney, Prof Aoife McLysaght and Dr Julien Mercille have been advocating for months.

These members of the Independent Scientific Advocacy Group (ISAG) have put forward a range of “appropriate and proven measures” to “aggressively” suppress the virus. Carefully targeted county-by-county post-lockdown reopenings are part of it, along with much more stringent testing and contact tracing and something we haven’t tried yet: forcing people who travel here to quarantine in hotels for 14 days.

As far back as last May, this kind of quarantine, used in other countries to stop the virus being imported, was suggested to the Government by the National Public Health Emergency Team's Tony Holohan. It was never implemented. About 54,000 people arrived into Ireland over Christmas.We are where we are.

Dreamers

You may say the people on ISAG are dreamers. That we’re not New Zealand or Vietnam or Australia, that this approach is not economically viable, that it’s an impossible fantasy politically, considering we have a 500km land border with Northern Ireland to deal with.

And yet they are convinced that if their plan is followed for the next few months, lockdown 3 could be the last lockdown: "Our pubs and restaurants can function as normal, arts and cultural events can resume . . . we can go to matches . . . the elderly and vulnerable can fully participate in society again. Further insolvencies will be prevented, and Government supports gradually roll off as the crisis finally ends."

We’re all fed up being Pandemic Rosies and Pandemic Seans and even Pandemic Micks – Pandemicks, if you will – boring each other with endless tales of life in the plague. Nobody wants to continue having our lives and livelihoods defined by this virus.

Since our current lockdown-surge, lockdown-surge strategy is  failing so spectacularly – here, in the UK and across Europe – perhaps our political leaders would consider the zero-Covid approach of more successful countries,  however imperfect or logistically challenging it may be.

It can’t hurt to consider it, surely. It can’t hurt more than this.

[ roisin@irishtimes.com ]