Long after Covid, the State’s failure to plan will result in grief

WHEN it is all over, when the rows about masks on schoolchildren and numbers allowed around the dinner table peter out, and when all the political capital is wrung out of the cost and handling of the pandemic, there will be heartbreaking consequences that will leave thousands of families in this country cold with grief.

The details of the National Cancer Registry review, outlined on the front page of this newspaper on Thursday, make real the fears that have lingered since the start of the Covid crisis, and the lockdowns that followed.

The contention of the Irish Cancer Society that missed diagnoses will have to be dealt with for years to come is tragic but also terrifying, because it isn’t just cancer that has gone undiagnosed in the last two years.

Physical and mental conditions have gone undetected in thousands of people.

Consider, too, the wider psychological impact of the fear caused by Covid-19, and the measures necessary to stall its spread. Loneliness has afflicted many.

Teachers and child psychologists anticipate a slew of complications caused by school shutdowns.

The closure of sports clubs and other social outlets compounded the isolation that older people felt when they were obliged to cocoon.

Just because many of these measures were necessary doesn’t lessen their effects.

That is only one of the reasons the Freedom Day celebrations in England during the summer were so gauche. The world will not conquer this virus, as the latest variant scare reminds us.

Instead, we will find a way of living with it – by vaccination, by continuing to follow much of the public health advice that has governed our lives for months, and also by resilience.

We will learn to tough this out, once the vulnerable are protected and the State plays its part in the provision of a functioning health service.

And there, of course, is the exposed flank in Ireland’s defences.

The job facing governments through this pandemic has been compared to trying to build an aeroplane while in flight.

There was a large measure of truth to that. However, as it now seems likely that Ireland will mark two years since the start of the pandemic, while still living under significant restrictions and vulnerable to long-standing weaknesses, the metaphor loses its power.

Irish planning stayed stuck in panic mode through the relative calm afforded by the past two summers, when longer-term planning for the provisions of the health sector could have been made.

Instead, come the second winter of the pandemic, there is the dismally familiar panic around ICU bed space and staffing levels.

Unstructured thinking abounds at a micro level, too, as the decision to scrap plans for free antigen tests illustrated.

PRICES dropped and so the Minister for Health decided the market had solved the problem. Leaving a new feature of our pandemic planning to the whims of the market didn’t appear to be an ideological move but rather was conceived in relief, that this was a detail someone other than the State had to address.

Almost every day brings a new example of garbled thinking, confused messaging, or fractured planning.

It all matters, because it hamstrings efforts to manage the virus, which would then allow for the resumption of peace-time initiatives.

Among the most critical of these are cancer screening programmes, but they are only the start of it.

That is why, when this does end, it will be vital we remember what we lost.

It is naïve to suppose that official Ireland will be minded to memorialise. The instinct will be to forget and fire-fight, leaving families to their silent grief.