With a little luck and a whole lot of science, we can prevail
THE Government doesn’t know what it’s doing. Every morning, we wake up to revised quarantine regulations, with countries stepping on and off the list like a sort of pandemic Lanigan’s Ball. Exceptions for elite athletes, legal challenges, refusals, fasttracked testing; as many commentators have pointed out, the Government had over a year to sort out quarantine, and it’s still a mess.
On Monday, they flipped on AstraZeneca. Again. The Oxford vaccine is really, really safe, they promise us, but they’re not going to put it into any arms that haven’t been swinging for more than 60 years, just in case. Last time they flinched over AstraZeneca, they didn’t want to put it into any arms. And then they put it into all the arms that showed up, including hundreds who hadn’t waited their turn.
Meanwhile, what level are we in now? My 19-year-old daughter asked me that yesterday and I honestly didn’t know the answer. Is this Level Five Lite or are we now at Four And Three Quarters? Or, yet again, has the way we categorise these restricted lives we are leading quietly changed? Maybe we should just call it The Twilight Zone and expect the unexpected.
But here’s the thing: it’s not just the Government and NPHET and the NIAC that appear clueless. The truth is none of us knows what we’re doing.
Here’s my latest headless chicken state: on Sunday, I managed to get my bike trapped in a gate along the River Dodder path. A kind stranger helped me dislodge it. After I’d thanked her, I looked at where she had touched my handlebars and wondered if I should sanitise them. A year ago, I would have; now, I didn’t. I have no idea if sanitising them was the right thing to do back then, or if not sanitising them is right now. I still sanitise my shopping trolley before I do my weekly shop, but increasingly, I suspect I’m wasting my time. But I just don’t know. None of us does.
We must follow the science, the Government says, but the reality is that the science is in turn following a new and dangerous virus that mutates rapidly and changes its way of doing its deadly business with each new variant. As Dara Ó Briain once said: ‘Science knows it doesn’t know everything; otherwise it would stop.’
In other words, NPHET and the NIAC understand they don’t know everything about the prevention and treatment of Covid; they understand there are still a lot of dark corners out there. When their advice to Government changes, sometimes it’s because a light has been shone into one of those corners; other times, it’s because they haven’t a clue what’s lurking, but they’re certain it’s something scary.
ILOVE the phrase: ‘It was a brave man who first ate an oyster.’ Perhaps, like everything else that’s changing in the pandemic universe, we should revise that old saying to: ‘It was a brave man who first fought a 21st-century pandemic.’ It took Nasa 11 Apollo missions to land on the Moon, so it’s not reasonable to expect the Ronan Glynns – and certainly not the beleaguered Stephen Donnellys – of this world to have all the right answers all the time.
It’s understandable that public confidence in the Government is very low. And certainly, their communication skills could be sharper, especially when we see completely avoidable messes such as the vaccination recruitment process. But even if we don’t trust them to keep us safe – and I think few of us do – we have to trust that they, and the various health experts charged with fighting this pandemic, are at least trying to keep us safe.
Seeing the celebratory scenes in the UK yesterday was, depending on your perspective, either deeply dispiriting or vaguely alarming. But it has certainly caused a lot of us to re-examine our own roadmap out of Covid and wonder if we’ll ever have fun again – especially when those joyous scenes coincide with our own latest vaccination setback.
All we can do is hold firm, try to be patient and remember that those of us who are in this together include the Government and the health experts. Perhaps the UK’s giant leap will be a huge and safe success, and perhaps it won’t. Honestly, none of us knows. As long as we remind ourselves of that, and keep taking our own small steps, then with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of science, we’ll get there.