Northern Ireland has found its acceptable level of Covid

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic differences in statistics between Northern Ireland and the Republic – even small brief differences – have been matters of huge public interest and political controversy. The issue has been seen from the outset through a constitutional lens, ensuring Northern fascination in particular.

A quest by activists to highlight differences has strayed into exaggeration and beyond. Politicians North and South have taken turns to preen and patronise. Rows within Stormont over minor cross-Border lags in timing have brought devolution to the brink of collapse.

Yet now there is palpable apathy in Northern Ireland as its numbers swell to some of the worst in the developed world, with double the Republic’s infection rate and 10 times its death rate.

Comparing a small region to large countries only means so much: at least three US states have worse infection rates, for example.

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Death rates are mercifully low in absolute terms as the North-South contrast is between vaccinated populations.

However, on the cross-Border and intra-UK comparisons made since the start of the epidemic Northern Ireland is suddenly a striking sustained outlier. The entire UK had a spike in early July that never subsided in the North, creating a new plateau of cases, higher than last year’s first wave and almost as high as the Christmas peak.

It is as if we have entered a permanent new state of Covid prevalence, with public and political acquiescence.

Robin Swann, Stormont's cautious UUP health minister, said this week that now was not the time to consider new restrictions. Swann also downplayed the prospect of more restrictions when the Executive is next due to discuss them in September, so it appears he is not merely keeping his powder dry for an autumn lockdown.

First wave

Sinn Féin has gone along with this, unlike in previous waves when it held solo-run press conferences demanding immediate action and denouncing alleged unionist foot-dragging.

Although Executive parties know the public is fed up and exhausted, that has been true since the first wave. Opinion polls show lockdown policies still have majority support when deemed necessary, so Stormont could act if it wished.

Declining to act does not reflect some hidden policy switch to “herd immunity” or a civil libertarian position. Parts of the DUP might hold those views but every other party would reject and expose them if they made it on to the Executive agenda.

The best explanation for Northern Ireland’s apathy is a recognition that Stormont and the public have done all they are collectively willing to do.

Hard lockdowns and prolonged restrictions have been accompanied by a world-class vaccination programme. Vaccination uptake began falling behind the rest of the UK in April, and is set to level off at just under 90 per cent of the adult population, a few percentage points below Britain and the Republic.

The vaccination programme dropped down a gear last weekend with the closure of seven mass vaccination centres. Efforts will now be more focused, such as on vaccinating young people in educational settings.

Swann noted last week that getting vaccination levels up by another 5 per cent would halve the death rate; 95 per cent is also the population immunity requirement for the Delta variant. These look like urgent reasons for a final push yet they appear to have been set against fatalism about vaccine reluctance in Northern Ireland. This reluctance is only marginally higher than elsewhere but it is making a crucial difference.

Complacency

Uptake is most sluggish among the young, which is more likely due to complacency than fear, and should be straightforward to address. A “Big Jab Weekend” before the mass vaccination centres shut brought over 12,000 mainly young people through the doors. Even if the centres are no longer the optimal use of resources, there is a strong sense that little has replaced them and nobody finds this especially concerning.

In an analysis article last week, BBC journalist Eunan McConville went through policy, demographic and public health explanations for the North’s higher figures and found none sufficed. He suggested “behaviour” could be the decisive factor: people have become less observant of the rules.

Tom Black, chair of the British Medical Association in Northern Ireland, believes there is a reluctance across the UK "to encroach on people's civil liberties", which is reflected in Stormont policies and public attitudes, whether consciously or not.

Black is among many who suspect the Border has added an “à la carte attitude”, with people shopping around for differences in retail and hospitality restrictions.

Nationalists see this as an argument for all-Ireland harmonisation; unionists reply, perhaps not always seriously, that it is an equally good argument for sealing the Border.

The difference this summer is that everyone has stopped having these arguments, even as cases soar. Like the Troubles concept of an acceptable level of violence, Northern Ireland has found its acceptable level of Covid. It will set the context for public policy from now on.