Covid-19 is now a global problem in search of an Irish solution

Things can change quickly in economics and commerce, but even those worlds rotate in slow motion compared to Planet Pandemic. Time after time, it has shown its ability to spin at warp speed with dizzying consequences, such as the human carnage wrought in Ireland over recent weeks following what was merely a brief Christmas interlude between lockdowns. Coronavirus is a Grinch.

This virus turns on its own plane and does what it wants, master of its world and ours. That is simultaneously awesome and dispiriting; the former because as humans we covet raw power and the virus has it in spades, the latter because we recognise that its power has, so far, outgunned ours.

People may yet regain the upper hand through the emergence of vaccines and if that happens – and it seems very likely now – it will restore our self-belief as much as our health. Yet the evolving power of the virus and its oft-shown ability to lay waste to our plans and control our behaviour remain facts. Commerce and the self-professed pragmatists who best understand that sphere must always be prepared to adapt to facts.

Greatest failure

Here is another fact. The greatest failure of those of us who have pushed for co-existence with the virus is that we have not yet discovered a workable template for doing so. There is no pleasure in typing those words, but there is truth. In Europe, Norway and Finland have come closest. But cool-tempered Nordics are hard-wired to follow social rules whereas we, emotional Celts, are naturally inclined to junk them.

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Proponents of a hard suppression strategy (draconian and lengthy lockdowns to eliminate transmission followed by domestic reopening with sealed borders, commonly known as Zero Covid) believe they have a template for living with the virus. They continually point to New Zealand and Australia (and sometimes Taiwan, South Korea and China) as examples of where it has worked. That’s five countries. There are another 190 nations on the planet who have ploughed different furrows, and they’re not all inhabited by stupid, unreasonable people. Each country has its unique dynamics.

The Zero Covid strategy sounds alluring. Zero implies complete absence as if the virus suddenly goes away, and who wouldn’t be in favour of a world without the virus? But, of course, it doesn’t just go away. It must be rounded up and chased out and the would-be viral invaders remain pressed against the gates like barbarians, ready to swarm once again through even the slightest gap left by inevitable human failure. Borders, especially ours, are hard to seal and the constant threat of a fresh lockdown remains.

It also glosses somewhat over the harrowing cost of eliminating transmission. Melbourne endured a hellish lockdown for almost four months, which should ensure a steady stream of business for its mental health professionals for years to come. Life may also be semi-normal for many people in New Zealand, just as long as they are not among the tens of thousands who work in tourism or aviation or companies that are suppliers to either; have loved ones abroad or, if they are emigrants, at home; the need to travel to maintain their livelihoods, or for any typical human reason at all, actually; or run an SME that may not have the resources for a prolonged shutdown.

That’s not to say that we’re living in clover over here without a Zero Covid approach. We are back in shutdown again and as a typical journalist, I have plenty of questions and pitifully few answers. But whether it is worth paying the full price of getting to Zero Covid is still a very relevant question, because the biggest reservation of sceptics of the approach in Ireland is not that it wouldn’t be nice, but that it probably would not work here. It if didn’t, the cost is wasted.

This debate is not new. New Zealand has no land border. We have the most porous supranational land border in the world running right across the neck of Ireland. What would be the point in flogging ourselves half to death to eliminate transmission and, alone, sealing ourselves off from the rest of the European Union, if there was a constant and substantial threat that people in the North of Ireland would simply pour across the Border to experience our virus-free Tír na nÓg? How could we stop them, with 300 mostly rural crossing points?

Wishful thinking

The most logical retort is to adopt an all-Ireland approach, which unavoidably necessitates sealing off the North from its jurisdictional siblings in Britain. I'd wager that not even former US senator George Mitchell could convince unionists to do that, while we in the South arguably have not given them enough cause to trust to try. Some public health experts argue it can be done, but the experts in carrying out that kind of thing, the politicians, believe it cannot. Who is right? I really do not know. It is an arm wrestle between the opposing charges of political defeatism and wishful thinking.

In any event, that it probably would not work in Ireland is not just some defeatist opinion held by the ignorant forces of Mammon. It is the considered view of the public health specialists on the National Public Health Emergency Team. You either want us to pay heed to Nphet, or you don’t. We are all guilty of inconsistency there. With vaccines on the horizon, convincing the public to buy into paying the full price (as opposed to simply asking them the cuddly question if they would like to live in a world with no Covid) might also be hard.

That is not to say the debate has no value. Personally, I suspect we are heading for a very Irish hybrid to keep the virus at bay as much as possible. The fright of what has just happened, along with the threat of new variants, will ensure a long period of tough restrictions anyway. The political and public mood also seems to be warming towards some strengthening of quarantine rules. Borders are stiffening across Europe anyway, which makes it a little easier to do it here. And the winter resurgence that has gripped Europe and the United States means most international tourism industry is wrecked for the next five or six months anyway.

It won’t be a lab-like, theoretical Zero Covid strategy. But it won’t be its opposite either. We might just do enough to muddle through. From the vantage point of the hole we are in now, that might just have to do us.