As of yesterday afternoon, 108 people in Ireland were in an intensive care unit in Ireland suffering from covid 19, according to the HSE’s own covid data dashboard. This amounts to about a 20% reduction in people in intensive care with covid 19 over the past two weeks.
In terms of cases, as it stands, Ireland is on course to comfortably miss coming anywhere near to NPHET’s most recent optimistic projection for covid 19 cases in December. As it stands, to meet the optimistic projection that Ireland would experience 146,000 covid cases this month, we would need to average almost 8,000 cases per day until the end of the year. The most recent daily figures were about 4,600 cases. We are on course to have tens of thousands of fewer cases than the NPHET model projected.
All in all, then, the country is doing reasonably well. Which makes it a struggle to explain the latest tweet from the nation’s Chief Medical Officer:
We are in a very uncertain and unstable position due to the high incidence of #COVID19 in Ireland driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant.
— Dr Tony Holohan (@DrTonyHolohan) December 10, 2021
“A very uncertain and unstable position”?
It is universally true that on almost any given day, many things are uncertain and unstable. It is true, for example, that Ireland is in an uncertain and unstable position with regard to inflation, or unemployment. A massive economic shock could, after all, hit next week. If you say that a position is uncertain or unstable, you can usually justify that with a “what if x happens?” question.
In this case, Holohan is hanging his hat on the variants, and their alleged potential to unleash chaos across the western world though, it should be noted, Omicron has thus far conspicuously failed to do so.
What the tweet reveals, though, is less about the future and more about the present. Our position is uncertain and unstable, he says, but what he does not say is that our position is bad. He does not say that because to say it would not be true: Our ICU numbers and case numbers are not only manageable, but far in excess of what Dr. Holohan’s team considered optimistic just a few weeks ago. If one was to appraise the present situation in Ireland against NPHET’s projections, it could only be reasonably described as “good”.
And that, dear reader, is why Dr. Holohan is not talking about the present, but the future. It is a clear shift from NPHET’s original mission, and how we consider the danger of covid.
It also demonstrates why so many people fear that covid restrictions will never end, or, at the very least, will prove almost impossible to get rid of.
Once you start making policies which restrict people’s liberties based on potential threats, it becomes harder and harder to restore those liberties, because almost every threat has endless potential.
Remember, for example, that prior to 2001, it was unheard of to take your shoes off in airport security. Then Richard Reid, the shoe bomber hid some plastic explosives in the sole of his shoe before getting on a flight, and forevermore, everybody in the western world was condemned to walk through airport security as if they were entering a mosque. There has been one Richard Reid, and one only, in recorded history. And yet, because of the potential threat, airline security policy treats everybody to this day as a potential Richard Reid.
And so, it is going with the variants. Every variant now is a potential vaccine busting, granny killing, health service collapsing threat. And since we have, in our foolishness, legitimised the restriction of our liberties to fend off potential threats, we will find it very hard ever to put this genie back into his lamp.
However hard it might be, it must be done nonetheless. In just two years, all that we have achieved with Covid policy in the west is to transform attitudes to risk across our society, to the extent that many people increasingly believe that other people living a perfectly normal life pose some sort of long term threat to their own safety and security. This intolerance of risk is completely at odds with everything that has gone before: It is the functional equivalent of banning anybody from living within a hundred miles of a volcano, in case it erupts for the first time in a century. We are becoming a society where Dr. Holohan, and people like him, wish to ban us from living, in case we might die.
When the Covid pandemic first hit, people like me supported the initial restrictions on the basis that the virus was unknown and appeared to be deadly: After all, who can forget the widespread videos of Chinese people falling down in the streets, or the alleged collapse of hospitals in Northern Italy? In the face of an unfolding disaster, Government action to defend public safety is justifiable.
The thing is: We are no longer in an unfolding disaster. And we no longer have Government action to protect against an imminent and known danger. What we have now, as Holohan’s tweet demonstrates, is Government action to hedge against uncertainty and instablilty.
The Covid response is basically the dictionary definition of what the Americans call mission creep: You go into Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban, you end up staying for a decade to build a new Government. In Ireland, what started out as a mission to protect against a natural disaster is now a mission to protect against what might happen next week. If you don’t believe me, just read the good doctor’s tweet, above.
This is no way to live. But until somebody has the balls to challenge NPHET, it’s the way we’ll be living for the foreseeable future.