To look at any Irish town or city today is to see a place where, by and large, daily life continues as normal. The sharp rise in Covid-19 cases has left people concerned, even fearful, but it is mainly a fear of what is to come. Are we heading for another lockdown? Could the hospitals be overrun? Might the worst scenarios come to pass? Official rhetoric, with its focus on projections and on decisions that need not be taken “at this time”, reinforces a sense that the surge is still manageable.
But the future tense is misleading. Ireland is in a crisis. Across the country, just minutes from where people crowd into pubs or shopping centres as if this were any other November, exhausted hospital staff are watching more and more people die or suffer terribly from a disease that is now rampant in the community. The worst question a medic could face – who to prioritise for life-saving care – is no longer abstract but frighteningly real.
When the State's hospitals are out of intensive care beds, or close to it – as most of them now are – the system is not in danger of being overwhelmed; it is overwhelmed. As Dr Colman O'Loughlin, the head of ICU at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, tells Jennifer O'Connell in today's newspaper, there is no optimistic scenario for the coming weeks, "only pessimism and carnage".
The future inquiry into the State’s handling of the pandemic will cast a harsh judgment on a public healthcare system that, due to political failures over many years, was so ill-equipped to deal with a national health emergency. But just as the dreadful consequences are not in the future, the failures are not all in the past. Today, almost two years into a pandemic caused by an airborne virus, ministers seldom even talk about ventilation.
A year after antigen tests were first approved by regulators, ministers and their health advisers continue to send contradictory signals on their use, in effect denying us a valuable tool in the fight against Covid on the basis, it seems, that people cannot be trusted to understand its imperfections. Four months after Israel observed a waning effect in its vaccines, and responded with a booster programme that turned out to be remarkably effective, the State's own booster rollout is still in its very early stages even though large vaccine stocks are sitting in fridges.
Meanwhile, the official response has been to tinker at restrictions, introducing an eye-catching but no doubt minimally effective midnight curfew for pubs and clubs even as public transport capacity is increased and tens of thousands of people are encouraged to squeeze into sports stadiums and to go drinking before and after.
There is understandable reluctance to reverse the reopening of recent weeks. But while the Government will not be thanked for placing new limits on people’s lives, it will not be forgiven for missing the chance to avert disaster.