Pat Leahy: Four failures that led to this fourth Covid wave

So we are not done with Covid, not at all. The lurch this week back towards restrictions – light enough in themselves but a signal, probably, of more to come – delivered a jolt to the Government from which it is still reeling. The complacent assumption that the pandemic was more or less in the rear view mirror – one person in Government circles was fond of saying “it’s over” from mid-summer on – has been spectacularly exploded.

And while Covid will not utterly dominate politics to the exclusion of all else, it will require daily management by the Government for the foreseeable future, and poses an enormous political threat to the coalition.

We should acknowledge that the “fourth wave” is not by any stretch of the imagination a peculiarly Irish problem. It has been sweeping across Europe in recent weeks, leading to a raft of new restrictions being put in place across the continent.

“The fourth wave is hitting our country with full force,” German chancellor Angela Merkel warned on Wednesday, before meeting state governments to decide on new restrictions. That day saw 68,000 new infections, the country’s highest ever.

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Cases in the Czech Republic and Slovakia hit record highs the same day. Belgium also introduced new measures on Wednesday, telling people to work at home for four days a week and reintroducing the requirement to wear masks.

All over the EU governments have either tightened restrictions or are preparing to. Even sceptical Sweden has moved to reintroduce curbs. On Friday Austria announced a total lockdown and compulsory vaccination.

Anticipate

But this should not disguise the fact that the emerging crisis in Irish hospitals is more severe because of the failure of four key bodies to anticipate and prepare for what has, after all, been gathering pace for some weeks now. The Department of Health, the HSE, the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) and the National Immunisation Advisory Council (Niac) should all have prepared better for the fourth wave. Some people who work in them privately admit this now. It’s a bit late.

HSE leadership and staff have performed for the most part heroically in the last 18 months. But they have displayed that most Irish tendency in public administration: to do crises well and long-term planning badly.

Understandably, with the receding of Covid over the summer and the spectacular penetration of the vaccination programme, the focus in the HSE had shifted by late summer. In September people were more concerned with the problems exacerbated by Covid rather than Covid itself: the million-person waiting lists, the approaching winter crunch on services, and so on.

There was a general expectation that Covid cases would re-emerge, but in nothing like the volume that has since transpired. That was a mistake. We know this with the benefit of hindsight, but it was a mistake all the same. Government bodies have to be capable of doing more than one thing at a time. We’ve got to learn to walk and also chew gum.

Where the HSE is also culpable is in not reacting more quickly in recent weeks when it became apparent that numbers were spiralling beyond what had been anticipated. There is now a frantic clearout of hospitals to make room for the expected influx of Covid patients. That should have begun at a more orderly pace a few weeks ago.

Undershoot

The failure of Nphet’s models to anticipate where the virus is going is becoming a bit of a habit. In the middle of October – when, in fairness, Nphet was seeking to sound some warning bells – it predicted that in a “pessimistic scenario” cases could rise to between 2,500 and 3,000 a day, peaking in the middle of this month. That turned out to be a significant undershoot.

Again these failures are understandable – predictions are difficult, as they say, especially about the future. But that doesn’t mean that they are not failures. We need to get better at this.

More quixotically Nphet has wasted time and energy on its strange campaign against antigen testing – a campaign which not only pits it against the settled decisions of the Government to push ahead with the use of the tests, but against common practice in many other countries.

Niac, which advises the Government on vaccination policy, seems to take its decisions at a pace that is entirely unconnected with what is actually happening in the world. That’s simply not good enough.

Trying to cover off criticism, senior Government figures have publicly praised Niac for its thorough evaluation of vaccines before recommending they be administered. This is a private joke in Government where many people are almost screaming: would they ever get on with it?

“Not operating on a war footing,” is the summary of one person in Government. It’s quite the understatement. A faster booster campaign would have put the country in a much better position to tackle this wave.

Frustration

It is the leadership of the Government that bears ultimate responsibility for all this. The frustration of members of the Government and senior officials with the agencies that work for them is intense, but ultimately the buck stops in Government Buildings.

It’s only a month since Taoiseach Martin told the Sunday Independent: “We do not want to go back, and we are not contemplating going backwards. The only issue facing us now is going forward.”

Well, he’s going backwards pretty quickly now. And there is hardly a person in Government who doesn’t believe that more restrictions are likely next week or the week after.

I think anything like a lockdown would destroy the Government’s claims to have managed the pandemic reasonably competently. But so would chaos in the hospitals.

We should note that the models show – for whatever that’s worth – that however bad it gets in the coming weeks, case numbers will fall like a stone after that. This wave will be difficult, but it will be temporary. By the time we emerge, though, the political damage may have been done.