Government will stand or fall on how it handles roll-out of the vaccine

IAM living in an area which has the second worst 14day incidence of Covid-19 in the country, which, in turn, currently has the worst record in the world. Dundalk South, which has a population of over 32,000, has a Covid-positive rate of one in every 26 people.

This is a staggering statistic. The people in the area are shocked and are finding it difficult to understand how our numbers are so high. We always felt that one of the main reasons for our higher numbers, from the rest of the country, was the daily travel back and forth between north and south, which is a fact of life in Border counties.

The continuing disparity of rules between north and south must have also been a significant element in the higher than average number of cases here.

But what has happened in this area, from the week before Christmas until now, cannot be put down simply to cross-border travel and differing regimes North and South. The explosion in numbers has more to do with the fact that there was an easing of the restrictions just before Christmas, leading to mass socialisation over the festive period.

After weeks of tight lockdown, the wider public decided to take the Taoiseach up on his promise that we would have a ‘meaningful Christmas’. As I forecast in these pages, it would be like a pressure cooker letting off steam.

The Government acknowledged that it was taking a ‘calculated risk’ by easing off on the restrictions, but added that it would not hesitate to reimpose them, if the numbers went up again.

Unfortunately, the relaxation of the restrictions at that time coincided with the Covid case numbers still being too high in the first place.

Added to that was the fact that the Government ignored the health experts’ advice. NPHET had recommended that, if the Government wished to open up the hospitality sector over Christmas, it should not be done simultaneously with allowing households to mix.

THEY emphasised that it should be one or the other, but not both. It is now clear that the decision to ease up on both aspects at the same time has led substantially to the exponential growth in cases since just before Christmas.

In fairness, the Government was being bombarded with pleas from many sectors and had to balance many conflicting opinions. The arrival of a new strain from the UK did not help the situation.

The Government will not be too quick to ease up restrictions in any substantial way over the next few months. Once bitten, twice shy. We can except to be under fairly severe lockdown right up to the middle of the year, by which time, hopefully, large sections of the population will have been vaccinated.

Which means that the sooner they can roll out the vaccine, the better. The general public will get more and more frustrated about the pace of roll-out, the longer it takes to make it widely available.

The Government, and its expert committee tasked with the roll-out, will wish to get the vaccine to as many people as possible, and as fast as possible. But they are subject to many constraints, not least the need to be sure that they have enough supply of the vaccine to meet the scheduled roll-out.

Being part of the EU can be both a help and a hindrance, when it comes to the vaccine delivery. We are part of a large group which can use its muscle to bulk buy.

But, its diverse membership, sometimes, means that decision-making can be very cumbersome. Last week, Pfizer put a spanner in the works by announcing that there would be a ‘temporary reduction’ in the supply of doses in the short-term, because they wished to ‘scale up’ their manufacturing capabilities, in order to deliver even more doses.

While this blip may be temporary, it does illustrate the need for caution on the Government’s part. And, despite the criticisms of the roll-out here, figures have emerged last week to show that, so far, we have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.

The Government are hoping that the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine will be approved by the European Medicine Agency by the end of this month. While it is, apparently, not as effective as the other vaccines, it is much easier to distribute it to the masses.

Undoubtedly, if this vaccine gets the go-ahead, it will be a gamechanger. Given its relative ease of administration, and the contracted quantities due, we can expect that huge swathes of our population will receive it from March to mid-summer.

The logistics surrounding the delivery of this type of volume of vaccines will have to be carefully managed. Doctors and pharmacists will have to be on board if this is to be achieved.

In the meantime, we all need to be patient, and careful. We could well be under tight restrictions until the end of that period. That will test the resolve of the public.

Last Friday, there was a flurry of tweeting after the Green Party Junior Minister, Ossian Smyth, put out a vaccination schedule which many thought was an official Government publication.

However, when I went through it, checking out the groups of recipients and expected timelines, I noticed that his schedule omitted the 60-64 age cohort.

AFTER a few hours, he issued an amended schedule correcting his omission. This is the very type of muddled information we definitely do not need to get from those in Government.

They need to post detailed and accurate vaccination figures on a daily basis, just as they do with the case numbers. That way, individual members of the public will have a better idea when they can expect to receive the vaccine.

Nowadays, because we are being bombarded with so much bad news, we have to be given some hope for the future.

We need to be assured that the rollout will be done in a fair and equitable way.

This Government will stand, or fall, depending on how well it handles the vaccination roll-out.