Steady hand is so critical in time of unprecedented crisis

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

There are really no words for it. I have been writing professionally for 30 years and I’m struggling to find the language to describe this tangled knot. People are absorbing huge volumes of information each day – it’s become a form of online gluttony where no matter how much you consume it’s not enough.

But of course we must. I’m reminded of Francis Fukoyama’s phrase ‘the end of history’. Inherent in the claim was that humans have become peerless. It described the triumph of neoliberalism in the 1990s. It was wrong then. It is wrong now.

There are forces in the world greater than us. A tiny microscopic virus passed from a bat to a single human being in a food market in an obscure Chinese city called Wuhan last November has the capacity to wipe out potentially millions of people.

The other phrase I have been reminded of this week when thnking of the Coronavirus outbreak is an old one: “doctors differ and patients die”.

That has been quite literal over the past month as experts try to curb the spread of a pandemic for which there is no vaccine.

Governments have followed expert advice in Ireland but there was always an element of guesswork and presumption there.

There’s no greater example than the situation in Britain where the government has eschewed widespread closures for the moment and where it promulgated the much-criticised theory of herd immunity.

It is true that when people contract this flu-like disease, they can develop immunity. But then this is a novel virus and different strains can emerge. And the difficulty there is that while the majority of people will suffer mild symptoms, there is a smaller but not insignificant percentage whose lives will be put at risk, or will die.

They are mostly elderly people with underlying conditions but those who don’t fall into those categories should not be blasé – evidence from Italy has shown that while children and young adults are generally okay, people in their 40s, 50s and 60s have ended up being intubated (on ventilators) in intensive care units.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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