Air Corps ready for daily deliveries to German lab
Expected rise in number of tests creates need for more missions to fly samples overseas
THE Air Corps is on standby to start making daily flights delivering swabs for testing to a German laboratory.
The defence force’s fleet, first deployed in the national testing effort on the May bank holiday weekend, has since completed four “missions” to Germany.
With plans under way to increase testing of people in the community, the Defence Forces said it is prepared to fly to Germany on a daily basis to facilitate the delivery of test samples.
The Defence Forces said the Air Corps has been tasked by the Government to be on standby for deliveries on weekends and bank holidays and will make daily trips to Germany if required.
At present, a courier company delivers swabs to Germany for testing on weekdays only. It said it has been “advised that the frequency of missions, and number of tests to be delivered, will increase considerably as the national testing criteria has changed.
“As testing increases in the coming weeks, we are prepared to facilitate delivery of test samples to Germany on a daily basis, in order to supplement weekday courier operations”.
Many of the missions will be carried out in the new Pilatus PC-12NG aircraft, recently purchased by the Defence Forces.
The Health Service Executive said it had reached a target set by public health experts of processing 15,000 tests a day by mid-May.
It is using 40 labs, most of which are hospital labs to test health workers and patients, and the German lab.
The HSE originally contracted the German laboratory, Eurofins Biomnis, to clear a backlog of untested swabs caused by delays in the system. The arrangement continues now that the backlog is cleared and as public health experts push for wider testing in the community.
Many of the missions will be carried out in the new Pilatus PC-12NG aircraft, recently purchased by the Defence Forces.
The HSE said the success of the restrictions in containing the spread of the virus has seen fewer people coming forward for testing.
The other laboratory used for large-scale community testing by the HSE, Enfer, in Co Kildare, is carrying out far fewer tests than it is capable of performing.
“Enfer currently provides approximately 6,500 tests per day capacity for Covid-19 testing, with the potential to expand.
“We have been operating well below capacity for the past week, with 4,500 tests per day due to the effectiveness of the current restrictions.”
The HSE wants to have as much testing capacity as possible available in the event of any increase in infections.
The HSE has published a roadmap to improve its testing and contact-tracing process for Covid-19, increasing testing and capacity, and reducing turnaround times.
As we emerge from this crisis, we can waste lots of energy and political capital by being angry, writes Conor Skehan
SOME economists claim that disasters are clouds with silver linings, because they stimulate new economic activity and create employment. Contrary to expectations, Covid-19 is going to result in significant increases in employment — which may even result in labour shortages and a return of inflation and eventually higher interest rates.
The ‘Broken Window Fallacy’ is a fable used by economists to explain the importance of looking at the wide context and the long term when trying to understand consequences. It claims that the ‘disaster’ of a child breaking a window, resulting in the parent having to pay for a replacement, can be seen as having the advantage of stimulating the employment of a glazier. One group of economists claim that the increased employment is an illusion because the parent can’t now afford to buy new shoes, so the glazier’s gain is the cobbler’s loss. Another group claim that the accident has forced the parent to use savings that were stagnating, which now have been forced into use.
Covid-19 is one big broken window. Lots of money is being mobilised by the EU and governments. Lots of new spending is now required to adapt workplaces — requiring new development and employment. At its most basic, social distancing will require either much more space or much more time to carry out activities. These all require spending on premises and wages — fixing the ‘broken window’.
The additional accommodation and time required will mean that we will need more venues for socialising and shopping. This will provide opportunities for more businesses, which will need more employees. Similarly, it seems very likely that spreading time — having a three- or four-day week or a two-shift day, will mean that businesses will need to be open for longer, which will also create additional employment in retail, hospitality, support business and transportation.
Yes, these changes will cost more. Yes, these changes will reduce the profitability or viability of many businesses, but those who can adapt will thrive. Yes, businesses may never reopen, often with terrible personal and emotional consequences for owners and employees alike. Yes, those businesses that do reopen will initially struggle to survive the combination of the loss of six months of income, plus the new costs of adapting to post-Covid work protocols.
By next year, we may well find ourselves struggling with labour shortages caused by this rapid re-expansion.
Across the world, these shortages, combined with increasing demand will lead to wage and prices inflation, often in the context of economies with increasing taxes to pay for this aftermath. Indeed it may not be long before historically low interest rates are forced upwards again.
Taking all of this into account, it appears likely that within 18 months many readers, their children and their friends may find themselves working in entirely new jobs, in new schedules and new places.
While it is difficult to know what to do — it is easy to know what not to do. There are already growing calls for insularity, protectionism, and nativism. Insecurity is leading to calls to give priority to small, local enterprises. The loudest shouters now are calling for a crisis recovery to be green, regionalist, nativist and socialists. None of these discuss taxation, job creation or international competitiveness, indeed many such activists are fairly sure that industry, capital and consumption are a bad idea.
Most activism is online and it is interesting to learn that a recent German report on political activism found that the majority — a whopping 92pc — of left-wing activists who were arrested for violent protesting were male and living with their parents. This says a lot about the connection between anti-capitalist activists and having an understanding about how an economy works.
In the surge of support mechanisms, it will be important to retain a balance of support and to remember to give equal attention to our world-beating specialisation — foreign direct investment — which provides the bulk of Irish employment. This is not to neglect successful Irish industries. Remember, more Americans work for Irish multinationals than Irish for American ones.
Our emphasis on ‘Irish’ business understandably put an emphasis on the numerous SMEs — the small and medium-sized enterprises that often provide the most visible, and local jobs. But we must not allow this to lose focus on what has already worked so well for DCC, CRH, Smurfit Kappa, Ardagh Glass, Ryanair or the Kerry Group — not to forget fast-growing specialists like Kingspan. All of these have annual turnover of billions and they employ hundreds of thousands.
Remember the harm of Ireland’s lost generations between 1930 and 1960, that were caused by naive protectionism that imagined that Ireland could thrive on the basis of native economic activity. Ireland’s success came from reversing these policies and attracting international industry. Beware of advocacy that uses words like ‘force’ and ‘must’ in proposals for new economic activity that seek to reverse this success. The only response of FDI to such policies is to flee.
We are undoubtedly at the start of an economic recession with huge job losses, business closures and mounting public debt. These are facts. The important thing is what we do next. How the future plays out will depend upon how we react to these circumstances. As Charles de Gaulle said: “Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own.”
We need to own this recovery and succeed by having a clear positive vision of what we are going to do.
As we emerge from this crisis, we can waste a huge amount of energy, emotion, time and political capital by being angry or defensive. After this these facts will remain, along with the question — what next? Our next steps will have lasting consequences, so we need to choose wisely. This is the moment when political leadership is vital. This is the time to have the moral courage to resist the angry, sleeve-pulling opportunists who view this crisis as a way to implement their own narrow populist agenda.
This is the time to take the wider view. Our political and economic response needs to give priority to what creates most employment and income so that we can fund our recovery. This does not mean any abandonment or neglect of the social economy, on the contrary, there are glaring examples in other countries, of the fatal error of neglecting the needs of our better selves by inadequately supporting spending on health, education, culture and voluntarism.
Reactions to crisis are the essence of human character. We can choose to fight or flee. We can choose to passively accept or to vigorously react. We are always the sum of our choices. John F Kennedy said: “When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters — one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”
‘By next year, we may well find ourselves struggling with labour shortages caused by rapid re-expansion’