Breda O’Brien: Bloomberg ranking a mere snapshot of progress

The Government is preening a little about being ranked first in the world in Bloomberg's Covid Resilience Ranking, which according to Bloomberg is "a monthly snapshot of where the virus is being handled the most effectively with the least social and economic upheaval".

There are reasons to be proud, which include Ireland’s phenomenally high rates of vaccination. (My home county, Waterford, is currently claiming to be one of the most vaccinated regions in the world, with a 99.7 per cent vaccination rate among over-18s.)

Nonetheless, it is a little sobering to realise that the US was ranked number one in the Bloomberg Ranking just three months ago. The ranking uses 12 measures, including progress towards restarting air travel (including internally ) and the number of routes both inbound and outbound that there are for vaccinated people. These two measures pushed the US to the top of the rankings at the end of June but it had dropped to 28th this month.

It is uncertain whether there will ever be a proper accounting of how well Ireland really did during the pandemic. We are not very good at accountability. We sometimes prefer to wait until something is far in the past before fully investigating it, a mechanism that allows us to demonise everyone concerned and congratulate ourselves on how much more enlightened we are today.

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Or where individuals are concerned in the present time, we shift seamlessly from denying that there is a problem to howling for heads. One of the important things about a culture of accountability is making it safe for people to disclose or criticise.

Public ire

If the culture crushes or shames anyone who admits to making a mistake, or even anyone who just differs from the party line, or suggests a better way to do something, the prospect of learning anything becomes remote.

There is also a certain randomness or disproportionality about which issues will ignite public ire that makes people fearful.

It is uncertain whether there will ever be a proper accounting of how well Ireland really did during the pandemic. We are not very good at accountability

It should be possible to acknowledge that when faced with a challenge like a global pandemic for the first time in a century, no one had a script. It was impossible to get everything right.

It is also important to acknowledge how hard so many people worked, including politicians, in profoundly stressful circumstances and how much was achieved.

It should also be possible to acknowledge the areas where things went badly wrong and learn from them in the future. We all devoutly hope that there will never be another pandemic but in a globalised, hyper-connected world the chance of highly infectious diseases spreading rapidly is less a possibility than it is a probability.

Even if we do not have a global pandemic in the near future, small-scale outbreaks or epidemics of previously controlled diseases may happen due to increasing levels of antibiotic resistance.

There are at least three areas that would benefit from dispassionate examination. The first is what went wrong in our nursing homes. We still do not even have fully accurate figures about how many died there.

Everyone from the Coroners’ Society of Ireland to the Irish Association of Social Workers has called for a statutory review. Long before Covid-19, the Health Information and Quality Authority had highlighted the inadequacy of the regulatory framework. There is another question, which is not unrelated to why so many older people died. Why are we warehousing the elderly? Why is there not a full implementation of government policy for the past 50 years, which is to maintain people in their own homes and communities?

Fudging legalities

We also need to look at a dangerous trend during the pandemic of fudging what was legally required and what was public health advice. The Trinity Law Observatory did excellent work on this.

For example, Prof Oran Doyle outlined the dangers of bringing the law into disrepute. In one blog, he suggested that "the [Government] strategy often appears to be to set the legal restrictions at a certain level, imply a higher level of restriction through misleading public pronouncements, and then allow legally ungrounded threats of prosecution to bring people in line with that higher level of restriction".

The favoured phrase of the pandemic, `the science says', was often employed disingenuously

This is disturbing on many counts. Democracy rests, among other things, on trust, and on respect for the rule of law. It is not acceptable for governments to manipulate, fudge and blur in this way.

Finally, the spurious appeals to science are also damaging to public trust. The favoured phrase of the pandemic, “the science says”, was often employed disingenuously. Scientists often disagree on the interpretation of particular facts. Rigorously testing hypotheses is part of what they do.

Anyone who felt a particular measure went too far or not far enough was liable to be branded a Covid-19 denier or a zealot. (I find the application of zealot to those who espoused a zero-Covid policy particularly disturbing. One can disagree about the possibility of completely eliminating Covid-19 without labelling those who suggest it as fanatics.)

If we can calmly look at our real record on Covid-19 without either defensiveness or demonising people, it would be far more valuable than congratulating ourselves on coming first in a snapshot competition like Bloomberg’s rankings.