Editor’s Note
There’s a memorable sequence in Pirates of the Caribbean when Captain Barbossa is having a parlay with kidnapped beauty Keira Knightley. She urges the good captain to abide by the Pirate Code and return her to shore. “You must be a pirate for the Pirate Code to apply, and you’re not,” Geoffrey Rush reminds her. “And the code is more what you call guidelines than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.”
That scene might cheer up out-of-work EU Commissioner Phil Hogan, forced to walk the plank into unemployment over breaching Covid-19 guidelines. Or were they rules, or regulations, or policies, or laws, or maybe a NPHET code? Not that such details matter anymore. In the Covid panic whipped up by professors, doctors, politicians and online trolls, you’re done for when the mob turns against you.
There was a grim satisfaction in seeing politicos hoisted by their own petard, as they’re the ones who’ve allowed the National Public Health Emergency Team to tickle their tummies. NPHET’s scaremongering has worked a treat, so much so that since mid-June weekly Covid-related hospital admissions have averaged around 20 compared with a peak of 650 in early April. Despite NPHET’s iron fist, Covid has been spreading recently, with c.2,400 cases through the first four weeks of August but only 14 deaths. In a normal week in Ireland, 60 people die from respiratory diseases and, happily, every week in Ireland 520 more babies are born than the number of people who pass to their eternal reward.
Covid-19 is a nasty disease best avoided, but it is no longer an existential threat. The sooner ministers realise that, the better for the economy and society. By the latest count there are 475,000 individuals receiving unemployment welfare payments, and another 370,000 people whose pay was subsidised through the summer. That subsidy is now being scaled back, so thousands more will join the dole queues. That’s the real emergency, not a bug that has been suppressed to nuisance status.
The concern for business is that the goalposts have shifted since the public health emergency was declared last February. For the national health system, Covid was an unwelcome disruptor to a normal routine that has now been reestablished. Twenty three of the 30-person NPHET membership are drawn from the Department of Health and the HSE, two organisations with a vested interest in avoiding Covid disruption altogether. The time is long past for the NPHET membership to be reformed with an injection of perspective from outside the public sector arena.