Michael McDowell: Can someone please tell me what the Covid plan is?

‘Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option” – James Cameron, film director.

Many people are beginning to wonder: “Is there a plan?”

We know there is an intention to roll out mass vaccination in a series of steps – faltering steps if the misguided AstraZeneca suspension is anything to go by.

But is there a plan? What does vaccination of the over-80s or over-70s mean? As far as I know, it remains a criminal offence for four such vaccinated people to get together for a game of cards, or for any one of them to travel 20km to visit a sibling, or to attend at a grandchild’s birthday or baptism, or attend a religious service.

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And if the vaccine rollout gathers pace as intended, at what point does the social and economic life of the country – for the vaccinated and the un-vaccinated – open up to an appreciable degree?

If, say, a majority of adults is duly vaccinated, does that have any planned consequence? Is there a plan which relates the degree of lockdown relaxation and the achievement of 50 per cent, 60 per cent, or 75 per cent rollouts?

Do those milestones have any significance in some strategy? Or is the plan to have no plan – except to hope that vaccination will at some point reduce the R-number to some at present unstated acceptable level that might justify a cautious reopening of social and economic life?

Put another way, is there any point at which we collectively adjudge that the older and more vulnerable have been sufficiently vaccinated to permit the younger and less vulnerable get on with their lives notwithstanding persistent low-level community transmission?

Nphet

The National Public Health Emergency Team has ruled out pursuing a zero-Covid strategy as a short-term aim. If so, it seems that the plan (if we can call it that) is to vaccinate and to contain the coronavirus by an ever-changing blend of lockdown and tracing.

The effectiveness of our existing tracing programme is a carefully preserved secret. We do know that a House of Commons committee found that the UK tracing programme had been a £35 billion failure. Is there any reason to believe that our tracing programme (whatever its cost) has been or will be any better?

Since we conveniently abolished the Dáil Covid committee chaired by Independent TD Michael McNamara there is little or no chance of getting real answers to any of the foregoing questions

Independent TD and volunteer vaccinating doctor Cathal Berry drew our attention yesterday to the very real issue as to whether the response to the national emergency can properly be left to one Minister and one department. Other Ministers seem free to give anonymous press briefings like a Greek chorus located in the wings.

Hotel quarantine

As regards the hotel quarantining regime, the Minister is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. It won’t stop an air-travelling Irish citizen from a safe destination who has shared flight or airport facilities abroad with an infected traveller from a listed destination from being a vector of infection for a new variant. It will reduce that risk. But nobody seems willing to physically enforce compliance with the quarantine regime. It may be a deterrent but it is far from foolproof.

Ireland, alone in the world, closed down its construction sector. Can it not reopen with on-site testing and tracing? Is there something unique about Ireland that prevents sites from reopening but permits meat plants to do so? Can addressing the critical housing shortage remain long-fingered?

It seems as if we are engaged in some attitudinal mind game in which any concession on lockdown, however rational, is seen as damaging to the collective will to combat the pandemic. That collective will cannot persist in the absence of hope and confidence. Ronan Glynn, the deputy chief medical officer, is a decent man. But he has got to understand that the younger and less vulnerable simply will not remain cooped up in Level 5 for much longer.

Another wave is a frightening thought. So too is a vaccine-resistant variant. But Northern Ireland will be much more highly vaccinated than the Republic to an embarrassing degree in a matter of weeks. So too will Britain – even if Boris Johnson has to go dutch on vaccines with the European Union. The UK is not going to remain in lockdown, even if it restricts overseas travel.

Government credibility is living on borrowed time. We have to see the way out of this. We have to see the stages along that way. We have to have some confidence that the survival of the acute hospitals’ capacity to deal with the pandemic is not the only over-riding determinant of national policy.

Hope is not a strategy – but it needs to be nurtured.