We must find a better strategy – lockdown is not the answer
IF ANYTHING demonstrates the dangers of lockdowns as a strategy, it’s where we find ourselves now. After the toughest year in living memory, we’re back where we started. Did we really learn so little in ten months of a pandemic?
Once again, the nation is under house arrest; our lives shut down, businesses closed, schools off. Click and collect is deemed too risky, so now it’s click and deliver only.
The height of excitement in my life at present is the Dunnes Stores at the Crumlin Shopping Centre, followed by DID Electrical across the road and the new Burger King at Maxol in Dolphin’s Barn. In my 5km zone, I can walk the other direction to Grafton Street, but it’s too depressing to see it so forlorn.
To start 2021 like this is madness. I think we’d be better off mandating hazmat suits and getting on with things, rather than choosing this state of social and economic paralysis. According to our leaders, we’ll be living like this until spring – so deal with it. I thought I was hearing things when Leo Varadkar said we’d be locked down until March.
It made me want to run off and join the Mummers – move to Leitrim and sit on a stool with a basket on my head playing a pipe until it’s all over.
There’s scant sympathy or support for those who raise the issue of hidden harms and deaths of despair caused by this lockdown cycle we have trapped ourselves in. Incalculable, long-term, cruel damage that will only be visible in the aftermath.
The great Christmas cock-up of 2020 is proof that rolling lockdowns don’t work – they just make things worse on the other side.
Yet there remains an almost superstitious belief in the potency of such a blunt instrument, exalted by its proponents as some kind of ideological expression of faith.
The same people crowing over how we achieved the lowest rate of the virus in Europe after locking down for six weeks are now carping about how the lifting of those restrictions led to us having the sharpest case rise internationally. It seems beyond their cognitive bias to see that one came as a result of the other.
If an entire society goes into hibernation, of course the virus will go down – for that period. If you never leave the house, nothing will happen to you either.
Blind faith in lockdown is a desperate grasp for security, which doesn’t exist. As Germaine Greer once said: “The only place you can really feel secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.”
This disaster didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was cause and effect.
It came about because we panicked and shuttered Ireland from October to December – locking down harder, faster, earlier and longer than anywhere else – and then opened up fully and enthusiastically right into Christmas, the biggest annual holiday, in the worst month of the year for the spread of such a virus.
In a normal human reaction to endless months of having no life, people rushed to restaurants just in time for a new, more transmissible strain of the virus to arrive, as evidence mounted about airborne transmission in poorly ventilated spaces.
It’s the most baffling decision of our handling of the pandemic yet, although you’ll hear plenty of politicians telling you they could never have predicted it.
The battery-operated crystal ball I got for Christmas could have predicted it. I bought a second laptop for the house because even just as a parent, I predicted we’d be back to home-schooling come January.
The academic Orla Hegarty – who is leading the way on ventilation strategies – tweeted a link to indoor dining reopening in early December, remarking: “This may be the biggest mis-step in the pandemic.” Surely the Government knew it too? Spare us the shock and surprise.
Those of us who are anti-lockdown always understood they are necessary in an emergency – as the World Health Organisation advises. But it is dangerous and harmful to rely on them as policy. They don’t control the virus; they’re supposed to buy time, but are pointlessly punishing when nothing is done with that time.
Other countries across Europe have gone for a more proportionate response, compared to Ireland’s
extremes. They didn’t get the flatlined case numbers of draconian shutdown, but they didn’t get the vertical rise on the other side either.
Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, France and Italy all peaked in November, and case numbers dropped at the end of December.
Our snap lockdown in October, designed to win a “meaningful Christmas”, just delayed the inevitable surge and exacerbated the impact. Hopefully, we will catch up with their patterns and see some falloff in cases soon.
Chief medical officer Tony Holohan gave us a glimmer of hope this week when he said we may be over the peak of the third wave.
We must look at other, innovative ways to combat the virus.
Our over-reliance on lockdowns sent us from hero to zero.