Approach of spring and summer can help suppress Covid cases

Locked up at home for months, for all intents and purposes; the television beaming a diet of doom-laden forecasts, encouraged to think of your friends and family as potential plague carriers, instructed to avoid human contact. Such is life nowadays.

But in case you’ve forgotten, this isn’t living.

Our current plight is unavoidable, arguably, given the Christmas surge. But politicians need to remember they are elected to find solutions, rather than “publicising pessimism”, as one doctor termed it this week.

Being cautious and conservative is fine, given what we have been through as a society, but failing to deliver hope will not be forgiven.

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Dubliners have been banned from leaving their county for almost five months now – apart from a fateful week over Christmas – and the rest of the country has fared little better.

Our privations, many and lengthy, have been borne with good grace and remarkable acceptance. Yet under the surface there are surely great depths of despair, depression and economic collapse that society cannot afford to overlook.

Public health officials are right to say we cannot have everything as our figures improve and that we need to focus on priorities. Keeping schools open was the Government’s priority, until it fell by the wayside after the Christmas surge.

Today, incidence among young people has dropped below levels in October, when schools stayed open during an autumn surge (though, for now, incidence among adults remains higher). It is continuing to fall. Nothing substantial has happened since last year, not even the arrival of new variants, to change the calculus around children attending school.

Officials say they are satisfied schools are safe environments yet the process of reopening them is proceeding at a crawl. (And, yes, I am the parent of school-age children.)

Halfway down a parachute jump is when you start eyeing exactly where you are going to land. Similarly, now is the time to tweak the school environment to heighten safety and address public health concerns around the greater movement that surrounds schools and even to consider vaccinating some teachers to further allay safety concerns.

Otherwise, Ireland will once again be one of the last countries in Europe to reopen its schools.

Stuck in mid-lockdown, the current narrative around the pandemic is repetitive and barren. Numbers go down, but not enough. Officials commend our efforts, but warn about complacency. Short-term wobbles in trends provoke misplaced fretting and analysis. The information about new variants is worrying but, for now, the extent of the threat they pose is uncertain.

With so much uncertainty around the Government’s approach, more people are drifting towards some form of “zero-Covid” policy. The arguments for and against have been well rehearsed elsewhere, but for this writer Ireland in winter has little in common with Australia’s summer, or China at any time.

Numbed, most of us have switched off; last week, for the first time since the pandemic started, Covid-19 did not feature in the weekly list of the 10 most-read articles on The Irish Times website.

Still, some found a new target for anger among those travelling abroad against advice, especially holidaymakers, while ignoring the fact that domestic socialising accounted for most of our massive post-Christmas surge.

Travel really only matters in pandemic terms when case numbers are low. Last summer, for example, after our domestic cases had fallen to minuscule levels, travel was a “significant contributor” to the re-emergence of the pandemic in the second wave, a new study has found.

Tightening up quarantine is a belated and necessary measure, but its main contribution is probably to serve as a deterrent to travel, and this is already taking effect. What we need to know now is that contact tracing is up to scratch for the end of this lockdown.

Reasons to be positive

In our enforced downtime, myths have sprung up. Some healthcare workers speak of treating younger and sicker patients this time around. Yet the figures show no great change in the age breakdown of patients in the third wave. You are less likely to be hospitalised if infected this time around. Even if you do end up in hospital, you are likely to be that discharged more quickly.

Neither is it the case, based on what we know so far, that children are more susceptible to the new variants than they were last year.

There are other reasons to be positive. We have managed to get though a winter with no flu, not to mention measles, mumps and other infectious outbreaks. We have taken what the more transmissible UK variant could throw at us and weathered it, so far. The approach of spring and then summer will put the wind at our backs in terms of driving down cases.

And, despite the noise and the lack of detailed figures, the rollout of the vaccine is proceeding as fast as can be expected. Whatever constraints there are, are external, either due to EU regulatory or purchasing issues or the ability of manufacturers to ramp up production.

Already, there are indications infections may be falling faster among health workers than in the general population, thanks to the inoculation of frontline staff.

By Easter, those most vulnerable to serious illness from Covid-19 will hopefully have been vaccinated; the ability of the disease to wreak havoc will have been greatly reduced. Though booster shots may ultimately be needed, and there is a whole planet to be protected, we can hope that the worst of the pandemic may be over.