WHY THE LOCKDOWN WAS RELAXED
Lobbying may have skewed the public debate about the pace of exit from lockdown, write Maeve Sheehan and Hugh O’Connell
IT had been a glorious bank holiday weekend of long hot days stretching into nights and an entire five-kilometre radius in which to enjoy them. When researchers embarked on their latest round of opinion polling to gauge the public mood last week, perhaps it was no surprise they found it upbeat.
Over Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, random people were asked questions designed to measure their well-being, if they were fearful or frustrated, doing okay or generally fed-up. In essence, from the Government’s point of view, how much more regulation was the public prepared to take before tempers frayed and the Covid-19 containment policy started tearing at the seams.
So far, so compliant. Enjoyment is up. Happiness is up. Boredom is down. Frustration is down.
“All of that well-being tracking suggests that the easing of restrictions has had positive benefits for people,” said Pete Lunn, the director of the Economic and Social Research Institute’s behavioural unit. He is also on the subgroup that is constantly feeding public mood and opinion to the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) and to the Government.
But the uplift was just part of the story.
One of the key questions that researchers asked over Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of last week related to the speed at which restrictions were being eased. Were they too fast? Too slow? Just right?
Most people — 54pc — were happy with how things were. Just 23pc suggested things were happening too fast, while an equal minority of 23pc felt that the process was too slow.
And that was the figure that caught Pete Lunn’s attention.
“I think that is very interesting because I think overwhelmingly the public discourse has been to speed things up,” said Lunn.
The campaign to ease the Covid-19 restrictions has certainly dominated the airwaves over the past fortnight, and behind the scenes, businesses have been vociferously lobbying the Government and politicians.
Did lobbying skew the public debate and give the impression that a majority wanted to speed up our exit from Covid-19 restrictions?
According to Lunn, initially in the pandemic there was a view that there was a vocal minority who wanted exit from lockdown and a scared but silent majority who didn’t.
“Now I think we can add to that the fact that a lot of the public discourse is around specific issues that people are trying to speed up, so I do think in general, there is a disjunction between the public mood and the public discourse,” he said.
As the Government was secretly preparing to fast-track the reopening of the country last week, the public mood as detected by researchers suggested that only a small minority of people actually wanted it.
According to Lunn, the level of fear evident at the start of the pandemic has fallen but there is “a lot of fear still out there”. A considerable majority believe that Covid-19 is likely to make a comeback.
“Over the last week, the proportion of the population who think a second wave of infections is more likely than not has fallen from 63pc to 59pc,” said Lunn.
“But I would suggest that the key point there is that it is as high as 59pc, suggesting that there remains a lot of worry out there.”
By the time the polling data landed on Lunn’s (home office) desk on Friday morning, cabinet ministers were already putting the final polish on the plan that would “save the summer”.
For weeks, Leo Varadkar had listened to many of his Cabinet ministers rail against the restrictions, the conservative reopening plan and the impact it was having on people across the country.
He organised briefings with Dr Tony Holohan, the chief medical officer, in a bid to appease them. That created only more anger as some ministers railed against the unelected public health officials whom, as one claimed privately, had created “a police state”.
In particular, some ministers felt they were being forced to rubber-stamp decisions already made by ‘the quad’ of Leo Varadkar, Health Minister Simon Harris, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe and Dr Holohan. “It’s quite apparent that Simon Coveney is not in the loop,” said one Cabinet minister.
Conscious of this growing unease, Varadkar invited all ministers to attend in person at a Cabinet meeting in Dublin Castle on Thursday evening. It was the first time that all the members of the Cabinet had gathered in one room since the crisis began.
“Leo was very relaxed, he’d no shirt on,” said one minister who quickly corrected himself: “Sorry, I mean he had no tie on!”
Ministers sat three metres apart and there was frank and lengthy exchanges of views. Harris outlined the details of the letter he had received from Dr Holohan that afternoon with the recommendations from Nphet that went further than planned, but it was not far enough from some ministers.
Michael Ring, the Minister for Rural Affairs, led the charge to ditch the 20km limit and others agreed. Business Minister Heather Humphreys advised on reopening shopping centres two weeks earlier than planned, as long as they closed food courts and removed public benches.
“Leo gave us all a great run. There was no closing everybody down, or rushing to another meeting, or do it all in two hours,” said one minister afterwards. “There was definitely a momentum there.”
Others were more sceptical. “I think it was more about giving them [ministers] the impression they had input,” said a Cabinet source.
Varadkar unveiled extravagant changes to the conservative and slow-paced process that he originally outlined in the country’s road map for recovery in May.
The five-phase plan was supposed to extend into August but was now compressed into four phases and — all going well — lockdown will effectively end on July 20.
The most dramatic measure and one of the most welcome was the decision to allow people to travel freely within their own counties or up to 20km from their home.
But there was something for almost everyone in the audience. For children and their hard-pressed parents, there was the reopening of the zoo, playgrounds in public parks and various other outdoor amenities. Public libraries will reopen, as can marts, although not with spectators. Twenty-five people will be allowed to attend funerals. It heralded the return of businesses — retailers opening tomorrow, restaurants, hotels and bars serving food from June 29.
According to Sam McConkey, the professor of international health and tropical medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons, the Government’s message was more nuanced than the Taoiseach’s delivery suggested. Two weeks ago, government ministers were reportedly at war over the pressure to cut the two-metre social-distancing rule to one metre — something for which public health experts were sticklers but which inconvenienced business.
“There was no budging on the two metres. Even if you go to see your granny, you have to stay two metres away from her,” Prof McConkey said.
“Have they budged on 14 days of enforced quarantine for people coming into the country? No they did not,”
In the game of probability and consequences that underpins the Government’s decisions on Covid-19, the Taoiseach had decided: if there is another outbreak of the virus, Ireland is now able cope with the consequences.
Dr Holohan had reported to the Government last week that the number of new cases is averaging 46 a day. The health service is ready to cope and the testing and contact tracing is up to capacity. Meanwhile, focus groups had shown the public’s ongoing adherence to social distancing rules. Dr Holohan’s advice came with the warning that there is “no certainty” on what the future trajectory of Covid-19 will be in Ireland
Other experts welcomed the measures too. Patrick Wall, professor of public health at University College Dublin and a member of the Nphet’s Irish epidemiological modelling advisory group, said: “The people at risk who need to be shielded are the nursing home residents, the frail elderly, the care home workers and workers in hospitals and their close contacts, and those with concurrent morbidities. Everyone else should practise social distancing and drive on. The virus is not a long jumper.”
Dr Catherine Motherway, an intensive care specialist with University Hospital Limerick, said: “I think everybody recognises that the country can’t cocoon or stay locked up for forever until this thing goes away, because it doesn’t look like it’s going to go away. I think and hope that we’ve all learnt to take significant personal responsibility in relation to hand hygiene. That will be a mainstay of how we stay safe.”
Others believe public health risks are still too great to rush out of lockdown.
Dr Gabriel Scally, a public health expert who was commissioned by the Government to report on the CervicalCheck controversy, said last month that there should be no return to normal life until Covid-19 figures “are down to zero cases”.
With Ireland averaging 46 new cases a day, and 28 on Friday, Dr Jack Lambert, the outspoken infectious diseases consultant at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, raised similar questions.
“I am concerned that we still have community transmission. And I’m concerned that as we open up the lockdown, that social distancing alone is not going to be adequate to prevent a flare-up of this virus,” he said.
“Other countries are getting to zero and are thinking of locking back up when they get to 50 or 100. And we are patting ourselves on the back saying we’re down from thousands to less than 100, and we’re satisfied with that. I’m not sure we should be satisfied with that.”
If there are new flare-ups, he asked, is the testing and contact tracing system welloiled enough to capture and contain the virus before it spreads?
“At the time when we needed up to 15,000 tests a day, we could only do 1,000 and now we are only doing 1,000 tests a day when have the capacity to do 15,000. I think that’s too late,” he said.
“A month ago, on May 7, I saw there were 550 cases in 10 clusters in meat packers.” A week later the 10 clusters had doubled to 20, Dr Scally said. “Is that a timely response to an outbreak? I guess that would be the question.
“We did great in closing down the country, we did great in preparing the hospitals for the surge. The surge is over now but I’m not sure we are totally prepared to open up the country. I’m not sure how the Government is going to handle more flare-ups and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
According to the behavioural research, it’s possible the Government could have held on to lockdown for a little while longer without losing public support. But it’s debatable whether the public would stay the course until the country reaches a state of zero Covid-19.
Another interesting nugget from last week’s research was that around 47pc of people surveyed admitted flouting the 5km travel ban and almost half of those surveyed perceived a greater lack of compliance in others.
However, it doesn’t take a behavioural scientist to know that most of the country is probably looking forward tomorrow’s tentative lift from lockdown. Even Sam McConkey, whose advice is to do your bit for the economy with some retail therapy. “Go do some shopping,” he said.
‘It suggests there remains a lot of worry out there’