Light in sight – but at the end of a very long tunnel

World of Politics with Harry McGee

How is 2021 going to pan out? We know already what the next month is going to be like, and probably February too. It will be March and April 2020 revisited. No school (for now). No travel. No anything outside 5km from home, and probably 2km later in the month.

It’s like a trapdoor opened over the last fortnight and everything we had stored up disappeared down a hole.

After weeks in which the figures dipped down to 200 or 300 and Ireland was among the top two or three States in Europe, we slipped right down the pecking order.

On Christmas Day the number of cases went over 1,000 for the first time in over two months. It dipped a little over the next day or two because the number of people who went in for texts over the holiday period dipped dramatically.

And then that phrase that has become so dreadfully familiar to us all over the past year recurred: exponential growth.

On December 29, the figures leaped to 1,500, and stayed around that level until New Year’s Day.

Two trends were also happening. Three times as many people were being tested and the percentage of people who were testing for positive was also rising alarmingly.

On December 21, some five per cent of those tested were positive. By January 3, that number had increased five-fold to 25 per cent.

That means that one in four of all people who went for a test were positive for Covid. And there was a hell of a lot of people going for tests: 28,000 on January 3.

The numbers were just rocketing out of control – 1,754 on January 1; 3,394 on January 2; 4,692 on January 3, and a staggering 6,110 on January 4.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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