Recovery when it starts will be slow and painful

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

The more we read, the more we learn, the more we know we don’t know – whether it’s the health of the people or the future health of the nation. But for weeks already, this has been the strangest experience.

I went for a walk this morning and it reminded me of the kind of landscape you go through in dreams, the kind of tunnel vision thing. There was near silence save for one robin noisily chirping in the trees. With so few cars and so many people walking and running, it has the air of another era. You see people forming perfect invisible circles as they pass, giving each other a wide berth. You have short and slightly cagey conversations. Social distance is a nice way of saying isolation.

And then when you try to think of the macro, it begins to fry your brain a bit. It’s like trying to think of infinity, or who made God, or what was there before the Big Bang. There is just too much to take in. There is no shortage of information, but a famine of knowledge.

It might be milder than SARS and less deadly than the Spanish Flu of a century ago – but this Coronavirus is more infectious and does not just kill the old.

Most who have died have been elderly and have had underlying conditions – but younger people have died too, including people working in health.

Look at what has happened to Boris Johnson this week. His admission to an ICU was a surreal moment in an unreal drama. He is 55, not young, but not old either.

What we do know is how quickly it has taken hold. We might be flattening the curve in Ireland, but the case numbers continue to rise. In a little over a month we have gone from zero reported cases to over 5,000. The number of deaths will be approaching 200 by Easter weekend. It’s particularly bad in nursing home – with 60 clusters around the country, and another 30 in residential homes.

You can do the math on that yourself. Those who live in these homes tend to be amongst the most vulnerable of all.

In retrospect, was it a mistake by the authorities to tell people in early March not to stop visiting nursing homes? Indeed it was.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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