Coronavirus - Remain Calm. Do Not Panic

The emails look legitimate, and they don’t reflect well on some of the celebrity experts who have had a very prominent platform on RTE to express their opinions.

Surely the correspondence is important, irrespective of the media platform reporting it?

What exactly is the problem with the contents?

But what about false nuance and false shades of grey?

They are not real nuance and real grey areas, they are attempts to cloud issues

Part of the problem with public discourse currently is that there is a massive tendency on the part of those who reject real nuance and real shades of grey to introduce false nuance and false shades of grey on matters which are pretty straightforward

Covid has been one of those

Europe and the west decided from the start that there would be nuance and shades of grey - and that decision has been disastrous 

Meanwhile those who were accused of rejecting nuance and shades of grey, the "extremists" of Asia, Australia and New Zealand, were proved correct

There was strong evidence that the UK variant was a serious threat

It was not yet known whether the UK variant was a driver of the massive increase of cases at Christmas/New Year

But anybody who was ruling this out was not dealing with reality

It was obvious to experts that the UK variant was very real and more transmissible - and would soon become the dominant variant in Ireland, if it was not already

And indeed that is now the case

Did we ever work out exactly how much the UK variant was a driver of the massive rises in cases at Christmas/New Year? 

My recollection is that it was a driver, perhaps not a majority of cases but a significant driver nonetheless

You are arguing against a thing called the precautionary principle, which says you take preventative measures to stop very bad things happening

I'm still trying to work out what the problem with the messages was

It very much seems to me that is entirely a case of a desperate far right rag trying to make a "gotcha" story out of absolutely nothing - and for entirely bad faith far right political purposes

That rag is trying to focus on the words "may or may not be true" and portray them as if the Zero Covid people were deliberately lying to mislead the public - when the reality seems to be that they saw a massive and real problem and suspected that the UK variant was a major driver of that problem but were not sure

But what they were sure of was that the UK variant was a real problem

There seems to be no problem at all in the messaging between the Zero Covid people from what I can make out

But no policy to deal with Covid suits our pre-March 2020 world

Our world pre-March 2020 was an internationalist one, based hugely on foreign travel - but this could no longer continue

Certain countries looked at the situation and were clear headed in saying to themselves "OK, the pre-March 2020 world is gone, what can we do to crush the virus and keep it crushed, which would enable us to achieve a reasonable degree of normality - not pre-March 2020 normality, but a sort of normality which is sustainable in at least the medium term, until humanity comes up with a long term solution"

We never did that

We were faced with hard choices and chose to reject the hard choices

As a firm supporter of the concept of the EU, it kills me to say this but free movement was in massive opposition to achieving any kind of sustainable normality

So was foreign travel 

But we, and by we I mean Europe and the west, chose to stick with pre-March 2020 thinking, we just couldn't and wouldn't give up these things, we couldn't give up our old thinking

We never looked to achieve a sustainable quasi-normality, or asked ourselves what needed to be done to achieve it

That proved to be the greatest extremism

Sorry Sid, but it is as simple as pointing to different geo-political, and social, and even seasonal factors. Don't get me wrong, I think it would be ludicrous to suggest that the EU has played a blinder, or anything close to it. But internal factors make things like quarantining a little harder to implement, let alone guarantee efficacy. I mentioned earlier how NZ has to play whack-a-mole in situations where cases get through and they end up needing localised lockdowns. Again, that cant be zero-covid, its highly robust-anti covid practice. There were undoubtedly things that could have been done, but the difficult point that remains is that given the land-mass, the non-homogenous states (in terms of membership of the EU), it would have been virtually impossible to create quarantine situations where there are no borders. It seems straightforward, but in NZ, where they are not entangled, it had all the geo-political factors going for it. As has been mentioned, Ireland is a tiny landmass, but with two states, and a common travel area with the UK.

Sid your style or debate always portrays that there is one simple solution that must be taken and that any other option is and then insert a whole host of cliches.  The real world of decision making doesn’t work like that as I am sure you well know if you have had to make big decisions. 

You're straw manning again because you find it easier to debate that - that's what Qewan does 

Big decisions are called big decisions because they have big consequences

And the consequences of getting big decisions wrong have been very big both for the west and for Ireland

I don't think anybody can deny that at this stage