Government’s wasteful Covid plan is just unfiltered hot air as bars, clubs and restaurants to shut by midnight
IN the Pantheon of the absurd, the greatest canard of all sits high on the throne this week.
The Government wears the glinting fool’s crown for putting front and centre the bizarre idea that shutting bars, restaurants and clubs at midnight will somehow stop Covid’s fourth wave in its tracks.
As a response to the worst infection rate in the western world, it will never be outdone for its head-in-the-sand idiocy.
The Government couldn’t have produced an idea more banal, blind to science and with its back to reality if it had tried.
Covid is an airborne virus. If one person in a room with poor ventilation has it, the likelihood is he or she will infect close to everyone sitting not only in their proximity, but anywhere in the room.
Covid doesn’t become more infectious at one minute past midnight.
Of course, if you’re vaccinated, you are less likely to catch Covid, but because of waning immunity, your chances are greater now than ever.
Shutting down the fun at midnight won’t make a blind bit of difference to Covid’s ability to infect."
Damien Lane
Shutting down the fun at midnight won’t make a blind bit of difference to Covid’s ability to infect.
Back of a matchbox stuff. A notion plucked in desperation like dirty socks from the laundry basket when your drawers are empty of a clean pair.
Thinking a midnight curfew is a useful tool in your pandemic armoury is like believing in eternal life, or putting faith in a daily diet of battered sausages to ward off heart disease.
Jaw-droppingly naive.
But the witching hour for hospitality was just one sorry element of the Government’s feeble and full-retreat attempt to arrest a growing catastrophe for our health system this winter.
The Cinderella midnight rule is a farce. But their work-from-home ‘request’ is another dish of melted butter.
Asking of someone politely depends on the goodwill of the person you’re asking.
When you’re up against it, as the Government is now, it’s better to demand.
A work-from-home mandate for those who can would have had more clout and helped stem infection to a greater degree over the crucial weeks ahead.
Sometimes in life you need to take off the gloves to deliver the knockout blow to your opponent. Throwing soft parries in Covid’s direction, as the Government has this week, will only make it stronger. And it will . . . watch.
Another dollop of emptiness came in the form of what to do about antigen tests.
The refusal by NPHET to countenance their use, in any shape or form, since the start of the pandemic has been a great error of public health governance.
They are still sitting in meetings with their buttocks tightly clenched when the word antigen is ever mentioned.
Ireland is so late to the antigen party the lights have been turned off and everyone else on planet Earth has gone home.
The Government was last night still fumbling around trying to develop a strategy for how antigen tests might be used.
And their ‘plan’ is so half-baked, anyone who wants to get their hands on one — even with a subsidy — will have to fork out at least €3 a pop for the privilege.
As for their use in schools, Health Minister Norma Foley is as clueless as the rest of us.
If you examine her comments this week, it seems she’s more interested in curtailing play dates and birthday parties than putting in place proper mitigations to protect staff and pupils in schools.
Some startling figures dug up by a fearsome colleague of mine this week shows how the Government has put all its school eggs in the wrong basket.
They’ve spent more than €61million ‘mitigation measures’ in schools. But it’s been on stuff that won’t weaken Covid’s ferocity. They’ve wasted €57million on hand sanitiser, when we’ve known for more than a year the virus is airborne.
Another €4million has been poured into the purchase of C02 machines for schools. But buying gadgets to gauge the level of poor air in a classroom does nothing to clean it of Covid.
For just €12m they could have given every classroom in Ireland a HEPA filter, which aerates a room and would have helped keep teachers and pupils safe.
Infection rates wouldn’t have been as high as they are now, not only in the classroom but in the community.
In the past two weeks, 14,000 kids aged between 5 and 12 have been infected — an increase of 35 per cent on last week’s numbers. Two kids are in ICU.
Norma would have been better off flying to Las Vegas and pouring the €61m spent on useless mitigations into the slot machines there. She’d have got a better return on her investment too.
Science has not been at the centre of the Government’s response this week. As a result, ministers are getting it in the neck.
For that, they only have themselves to blame. When you abandon logic, confusion and despair inevitably begin to reign.
BOOSTER MESS IS MORE OF THE SAME
I DON’T know whether to laugh or cry.
The National Immunisation Advisory Committee gave the green light for 50-59-year-olds to receive a Covid booster shot this week.
In five days’ time, it will be six months since I received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson jab.
Understandably, I’m worried about the continued efficacy of the shot I was given.
Countless studies show its durability against Covid falls off a cliff after two months.
One study calculated its efficacy drops to as low as 13 per cent.
Since NIAC’s announcement, the HSE has been very quiet.
I poked them yesterday on Twitter, asking when could I and the 240,000 others in the same J&J boat could expect to receive their booster?
They came back to me in jig time, but their response was not one I was expecting. They said: “If you are under 60, and not a healthcare worker, you do NOT need a booster dose at this time.
“This includes people under 60 who got the single dose Janssen (J&J) vaccine.”
What!?!?
So, Stephen Donnelly, NIAC’s decision counts for nothing and the rollout of a booster to 50-59-year-olds is not happening anytime soon? Either that, or the HSE isn’t aware of what NIAC decided this week.
I’m very confused.
EARTH'S UNEVEN KEEL ON DISPLAY
IT has been a November like no other I remember.
Unseasonably mild, is one way to put it. Last Saturday, the outside temperature read 17°C degrees on my phone.
The weather is more like that of May than the first month of winter.
Growing up, November was always among the dreariest and coldest months of the year.
If it wasn’t frosty or icy, the rain fell at an incessant pace. The accompanying biting wind would make a trip outdoors a perilous exercise.
We are three weeks into November, and it’s a rare day I put the heating on in the house. Yes, a jumper is required. But the radiators remain off, by and large.
The birds seem confused. The plants in the back garden must feel like blooming.
This warm month is all the evidence you ever needed that the Earth is on an uneven keel.
The effects of global warming are being felt across the world.
Ireland is becoming warmer and wetter.
Whether it’s too late to reverse the damage done remains in question. We’ll know soon enough.
It won’t be my generation that will feel the full wrath of climate change.
My kids and theirs will carry the can for the failure to protect the planet over the last century.
BACK THE BOSS TO LEAD US FORWARD
THE FAI can surely have no qualms about offering Stephen Kenny another contract as Ireland manager?
However, ahead of a board meeting later this month, former Ireland goalkeeper, Packie Bonner and FAI President Gerry McAnaney have refused to endorse Kenny, whose team are playing attractive, goal- scoring football — a breath of fresh air after all these years.
Bonner would only say of Kenny’s last few exhilarating games in charge: “It’s a progression, we’ve all been encouraged by what’s happened.
"We have seen the emergence of some young players but I also love the emergence of our older players in confidence and so on. It’s about getting that balance.”
Of course they don’t want to pre-empt what the FAI might decide, but surely there is no one better than Kenny to lead Ireland for the next two or three years?
The players want him, the fans want him. The FAI must want him too.
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SUPERB NARCOS A WELCOME ESCAPE
THIS week has been most depressing.
We’re in the midst of a fourth Covid wave and the projections from now until Christmas are dire.
It’s been hard not to drown in the sea of misery, but I’ve dragged myself from the swell by escaping to the warmth of Netflix.
If you haven’t watched it, I recommend the series Narcos: Mexico.
It’s the story of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo — played by Diego Luna — the first of Mexico’s major drug traffickers, who rose to prominence in the 1980s.
Over several years he managed to unite the competing cartels across Mexico, turning them from small-time weed peddlers into the world’s most formidable criminal organisation, trafficking thousands of tonnes of Columbian cocaine into the US every year.
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The acting is superb. The characters are formidable. The story is incredible.
Narcos: Mexico, my way out of the morass for the next few miserable weeks.
SEPARATED AT BIRTH
JOHNNY Logan is one of pop’s great enigmas. A standout Eurovision performer — and two-time winner — he carved a stellar career in Germany of all places, where he’s a warbling god.
Johnny’s a legend in Ireland too of course, because he, like the rest of us, doesn’t take himself too seriously.
A colleague pointed out that Johnny does look a lot like WikiLeaks head honcho Julian Assange.