Pat Leahy: The virus is setting the pace; the Government follows

Once again, politics and public affairs have taken an almighty lurch; once again the coronavirus pandemic has upended life in Ireland. The third lockdown – less stringent than the first but longer than the second – commences on Christmas Eve, and will be fully in place by the new year. It will be reviewed on January 12th, the Government said; Leo Varadkar admitted it will probably last until early March. Two months.

The change in mood in Government in recent days has been astounding. Last week, people were looking forward to Christmas, happy in the knowledge that the Government’s decision to lockdown for six weeks beginning in mid-October had “saved” Christmas – unlike in many other EU countries and the UK, which were all introducing new restrictions in the face of surging case numbers.

But Covid moves fast. On Friday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin was getting alarmed by rising numbers of cases and indicated that restrictions on hospitality might be necessary. The familiar Nphet warnings began to appear. By Sunday, however, the picture had changed violently. Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly went on the radio and said the Government would be announcing decisions that evening. Most travel from Britain was banned.

Gloomy resignation

But there was more to come and by Monday, lockdown was on the way. An evening briefing session involving public health experts and health service chiefs was followed by a Cabinet sub-committee meeting which agreed on most of the restrictions to be put to the Cabinet for approval on Tuesday morning. Projections of thousands of cases per day were put before Ministers. “We just had no choice,” was the verdict of one person present. The Cabinet approved the measures with an air of gloomy resignation. The country reeled in shock at the suddenness and extent of the change.

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Is it necessary? The numbers are clearly rising alarmingly. But the second wave, although it led to the second lockdown in mid-October until the end of November, saw cases rise to 1,200 a day at its apex. And yet it never remotely threatened to overwhelm hospitals and health services. Hospital numbers veered between 200 and 300 at any one time (there’s about 11,000 beds in the acute hospital system) and the numbers in intensive care were generally between 30 and 40.

The number of deaths from the virus was very low, a fraction of the first wave. In April, there were dozens of deaths every day; in November, the numbers were threes and fours and fives. There seems to have been very few if any, “excess” deaths – deaths above the numbers that would normally be expected. The rapid move on Tuesday tells us that public health chiefs and politicians believe the third wave numbers of infections are going to be significantly worse.

Reactive mode

The Taoiseach insisted on Tuesday that the third wave was different to the second, in that greater numbers of elderly people were becoming infected this time. But it is not clear yet if the third wave is all that different. We don’t know yet. It’s only a few days old.

The truth is that the Government remains in reactive mode – reacting to the progress of the virus, and sometimes to its own public health experts. It has one tool to control the virus – restrictions, and ultimately, lockdown. The virus is setting the pace; the Government follows.

There were pledges aplenty in the autumn of no returns to a lockdown. But ultimately, spiralling cases – and the threat of hospitals being overrun – remain the thing that can scare everyone in Government. That prospect was real in the spring. It was a phantasm in the autumn, but it’s winter now, and the spectre has returned. Fear rules.