New figures from the Department of Health show that two-thirds of confirmed cases of COVID-19 as at Monday of this week are in people under the age of 55. The National Public Health Emergency Team analysed 271 cases notified as at midnight Monday, 16 March. In a release this evening (Wednesday) the Health Protection Surveillance […]
So apparently there’s this illness going around at the moment, you might have heard about it, kind of a big deal. Sorry, don’t mean to be flippant – it is my defence mechanism. For a number of weeks now I have been viewing the COVID-19 outbreak in other parts of the world with some interest but […]
Was Leo Varadkar’s speech a “shameless PR exercise”? PLUS: what steps should the government be taking to beat Covid-19? #gript
Irish Ambassador to Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, penned a book with Dr. Oliver Johnson entitled ‘Getting to Zero (A Doctor and a Diplomat on the Ebola Frontline). The title, as indicated, relates to getting to zero cases of Ebola at a single time, meaning when the last infected patient had […]
Beginning with denial and ending with acceptance, the five stages of grief proposed by Swiss-American psychologist Ellizabeth Kubler-Ross made her famous during her lifetime and even became a staple of popular culture. Sometimes one almost wonders, watching the Irish reaction to one event after another, whether she would have been tempted to slot ‘Brit-bashing’ somewhere […]
God bless Vanessa Hudgens. Right across the media people are looking for content that isn’t utterly depressing, or isn’t about the bloody so-called “curve”, or “social distancing”. And let me tell you, it’s a bleak, bleak landscape for content right now. And then along comes a good-looking Hollywood starlet to say something absolutely outrageous. It’s […]
Most of the praise for the Taoiseach’s well-delivered speech to the nation last night has focused on his reassuring tone and calm embodiment of national determination. Those things, are, of course, entirely subjective. For myself, I thought it was very good – his finest hour in fact, not that there’s much competition for that particular […]
Prior to the current Covid scare the last great pandemic was the 1918 Great Influenza outbreak. It followed the end of the First World War and was intimately connected to the awful conditions which spread from the killing fields of Europe. It was greatly exacerbated by the poor housing and sanitary conditions of people living in […]
The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnston, has rapidly changed the coronavirus strategy for Britain as a new expert report warned the country might experience up to 250,000 deaths if the the current course of action was continued. The new report is said to be the main reason for the swift and significant change in strategy […]
It is now readily acknowledged that China, through a series of unprecedented and restrictive public health and quarantine measures ‘bought the world some time’ in the global fight against Covid-19. Most of those actions would not have been possible in western democracies, relying as they did for their implementation on the authoritarian nature of the […]
It’s been a rough couple of days for the British Prime Minister. First, there was the unfortunate announcement from his Government’s scientific advisors that they had, erm, under-estimated the scale of the Coronavirus problem by a magnitude of thousands of potential deaths, because, well, they’d been modelling an entirely different disease: The UK only realised […]
For anyone interested, as softies like me are, in wildlife conservation and protection, the People’s Republic of China has long been the world’s greatest and most abominable villain. Nearly all of the poaching of endangered species in Africa, for example, is carried out to meet the demands of the Chinese market. Rhinoceros are regularly shot, […]