The recent rise in Covid cases in Ireland has nothing whatsoever to do, according to NPHET, with the decision to open schools in Ireland. No. It is instead a result of an increase in household visits, according to the State’s Covid Czars:
A doubling in the amount of inter-household visiting since the start of February has been cited as a factor behind the plateauing of Covid-19 case numbers.
One in 10 people visited another household for social reasons in mid-March, up from one in 20 at the start of February, according to assistant chief medical officer Dr Ronan Glynn.
Most of the visits involved time spent indoors, surveying carried out for the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) found.
“While this clearly demonstrates the vast majority of people are sticking with the public health guidance, it does represent a significant change versus January,” Dr Glynn said……
……The number of cases among younger children has risen by 40-60 per cent since the start of February but officials declined to link this increase to the re-opening of schools.
It is important to say here that believing that schools are responsible for the uptick in cases amongst children of school age is not the same as arguing that schools should be closed. But it takes a simply remarkable level of chutzpah for NPHET to ask the public to believe that these children are actually contracting Covid because their families decided – allegedly – to visit other households.
What we have in Ireland is a situation where the level of public mingling was directly increased by a Government decision – in this case, to open schools. Some weeks later, the number of cases has plateaued, if not slightly increased. NPHET, quite correctly, notes that this is a possible outcome of more public mingling. But not, they say, the public mingling that the government authorised. No. The real culprit, as usual, is the public.
This will be, make no mistake, a very popular line for Government agencies and politicians to take, if the pandemic lingers on for another few months. “Not our fault”, they’ll say – “we advised you all to stay at home and drink water, and you’re clearly not all doing that”.
The problem with this is that we are expected to believe that children gathering with other children in homes, as a result of alleged – alleged – lockdown breaches is driving a rise in Covid cases, while these same children mingling in schools as a result of a Government policy decision has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Other media outlets, of course, are repeating this line – as they do with almost every new NPHET pronouncement – as if it was holy writ, rather than an obvious, and entirely self-serving, attempt to avoid any criticism of the Government.
What is the evidence, incidentally, that household visits have doubled? Presumably the Government and NPHET are conducting regular opinion polling and other market research to determine compliance with, and adherence to, the lockdown, and the “slippage” hypothesis is based on this research.
But using any market research, a move of 5% in either direction is likely to be almost within the margin of error. If NPHET are asking people in one month, and then another, whether they have visited another person’s home, then a move from 5% to 10% is close to being statistically insignificant. Presenting it definitively as a “doubling” is entirely dubious, given the vagueries of opinion polling and market research.
But of course, it suits the political agenda.
The Government wants to be in a position to blame each and every failure and increase in cases on people who are not the Government. The Government has had the country in level five lockdown for months now – if cases keep rising, they can’t go to a level six or seven lockdown. Level five is all there is. If this doesn’t work, then the whole project will have failed.
And if the whole project fails, then a failure story that doesn’t involve the Government getting it wrong will have to be concocted. And this, my friends, is it: “Everything was going fine until you people decided to start visiting each other’s homes”.
The media is not going to interrogate this, of course, because the beauty of it is that it is unfalsifiable. We can’t say definitively that it is right, or wrong. We only know that NPHET has “numbers” to back it up. Where those numbers came from, or how reliable they are, is an obvious question, but the Irish media is not always known for asking the obvious questions.
And so the story is this: This is all your fault, NPHET did nothing wrong, blame your neighbours and family and friends, and not the Government.
It’s pathetic. But of course, lots of us will fall for it. As usual.