One of the biggest problems, as the covid 19 pandemic has proceeded in Ireland, is that science itself has been sidelined. What do I mean by that? I mean that as a country, the way we look at covid 19 restrictions on movement, socialisation, and all the rest of it has become less and less scientific, and more and more based on what we might term a “feeling”.
For example, when cases go up, there are calls for “more restrictions”. But there is rarely, if ever, any clear scientific plan or reasoning attached to those restrictions other than the vague idea that if each of us meets fewer people, the virus will have fewer chances to spread amongst the population. Call it R-number theory: That is the scientific basis, or at least it originally was, for all restrictions: That if the R-number – the number of people each infected individual would infect – could be kept below one, then the virus would naturally recede. In theory, it works perfectly. In practice, it was always unsustainable.
And of course, for most ordinary people, the science has always been a little bit irrelevant: The pandemic has been reduced to a simple equation: When cases go up, close things down. And when cases go down, we can, maybe, possibly, with very great caution, talk about opening things in six to eight months, if we are very sure that it will not result in a surge.
Our conversation, in other words, is entirely based on fear and worry.
In Ireland, the much-ballyhooed omicron wave is now receding. It did us, truth to be told, very little harm. Hundreds of thousands of people caught the virus, and the health service survived just fine. Cases are now falling. In London, which was ahead of us in the wave, cases are falling off a cliff. You do not have to be a genius to realise that the same will happen here, soon.
And yet, despite that, all the official talk with regard to re-opening is “caution” and “a careful re-opening”.
Why? What’s the scientific case for not just opening everything tomorrow?
These are, after all, our freedoms which are being discussed. For many people, it is about the freedom to earn a living. For some medical staff who are unvaccinated, it is about little less than their right to remain in a job. If these freedoms are to continue to be curtailed, then the very minimum we should be demanding is a full outlining of the scientific evidence underpinning the Government’s policy.
The problem, of course, is that such scientific evidence does not appear to exist. It is telling, for example, that NPHET (whose models have been poor, to say the least) have not even gone to the trouble of modelling, and releasing, data on the impact of ending restrictions. How many more cases would such a decision result in? That is a basic question: One might not trust the models, or disagree with the answer they provide, but it is objectively remarkable that there is not even a hint of discussion about what the present restrictions are achieving, and what their relaxation might result in.
In any actually scientific discussion, this would be on the table. The objective, after all, was always to “flatten” the curve. This means that the ideal outcome is a relatively level, sustainable level of cases over time, until the virus burns itself out. It actually makes sense, if the objective is to flatten the curve, to loosen or end restrictions precisely because we will have more cases, at a sustainable level, and a flatter curve. Again, nobody even considers this, let alone asks the scientific questions about it.
What we have in Ireland is a plainly political lockdown, not a scientific one. (And it is, in fact, a lockdown: When there’s an effective curfew in bars, that is a lockdown, folks).
This week, the Tánaiste, Mr. Varadkar, talked about having many fewer restrictions this summer. This summer? Why? What is the scientific evidence that says it is safe to open in the summer, but not safe to do so now? Did anybody ask him that question?
The odd thing about all of this is that it remains the case in some quarters that the anti-lockdown movement is accused of being “anti-science”. The truth is that we (and yes, your author is one) are the only people actually asking scientific questions. As so ever amongst the “trust the science” people, science is more a theoretical thing than a real, or useful, tool.
The most recent wave is receding. That presents two obvious questions: First, what have the restrictions actually achieved, and second, what is the justification – in scientific terms – for their continuance?
A NPHET that cannot, or will not, answer those questions is not a scientific body. But we knew that already, didn’t we?