Mick Clifford: Why Ireland must face tough questions about its covid strategy
Five years on from the arrival of the virus on these shores the tail of the pandemic is still being felt.
Big catastrophes often have a long tail, reaching out into the years that follow. Take the economic crash of 2008. The country went through austerity for a few years but due to competent management in one aspect of the economy, recovery was relatively swift in most parts of society. Apart, of course, from the tail which came in the form of a housing crisis. That is having a devastating impact on a cohort of the population, sending ripples right across society.
Covid was in many ways an even bigger catastrophe than the economic crash. As of last November, there have been 10,072 covid-related deaths in this State since the virus first arrived in early 2020. Most of these occurred in the first two years of the pandemic. Recorded cases of the virus are somewhere in excess of 1.7m, with around 1.5m of those being recorded before February 2022.
The loss of a loved one to the virus was a traumatic experience for those bereaved. What often heightened the trauma was the circumstances of a death and the subsequent funeral rite. Loved ones had to say goodbye through a window or a phone. The comfort blanket of a community gathering around in the aftermath of death was also missing. And there were always the questions surrounding a death, particularly in settings like nursing homes. Could it have been avoided? Who was responsible for spreading it? Was the Government, the State authorities, doing all that they could to lessen the mortality rate?
Five years on from the arrival of the virus on these shores the tail of the pandemic is still being felt.
There is the spectre of long covid, but far bigger is the long-term impact on the psychological health of particularly the elderly and the young from the lockdown conditions at the time. In a comprehensive review of the pandemic in the last Monday, Ava Rose Gallagher, who was a teenager heading towards the Leaving Cert in 2020, wrote that lockdown significantly impacted on her generation.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there has been a surge in anxiety among young people. Like many of my friends, I really felt the weight of lockdown on my mental health, both during lockdown and to this day even after it has ended.”
Catherine Motherway, who worked as an intensive care consultant in UHL during the pandemic, wrote that all of the actions taken to alleviate risk and death “should be questioned in hindsight".
She went on: “Inquiries should look at both the positive impacts in terms of decreasing spread of the disease, flattening the curve and avoiding the health services being overwhelmed. But also we need to look at negative outcomes, lack of socialisation for children, isolation in certain groups, especially older people, lack of resources, and delays to scheduled medical care.”
Those outcomes are difficult to measure but are hugely important in assessing the impact of the virus.
A new study published this week, the fifth anniversary of the announcement to close all schools, colleges and creches to tackle the pandemic, found that teachers believe junior infants may not be faring as well as children born before 2020. The research from the Mary Immaculate College in Limerick revealed that 81% of teachers surveyed say that they “have more pupils now with emotional and behavioural issues compared with pre-pandemic times”.
Parents have even more questions about the impact, according to a study released by the Central Statistics Office this week. It found that “seven in 10 (71%) parents feel the social development of at least one of their children has been negatively impacted by the periodic closures of early childcare and education facilities when covid-19 restrictions were in place”.
All of this needs to be officially acknowledged.
There is a growing view that the second and subsequent lockdowns did more harm than good. At the time, the focus was on whether there were enough restrictions, and suggestions the country should go the way of others — such as New Zealand — to effectively implement a zero covid strategy.
This was led by a group of academics and scientists operating under the banner of the Independent Scientific Advisory Group (ISAG). Among their main proponents was Professor Aoife McLysaght, who has since been appointed the government’s chief scientific advisor. Political parties such as People Before Profit and Labour advocated for this approach. All of it was done with a genuine belief that the best outcomes for the population at large would be to follow this path.
Yet most of the arguments were framed in an economic context. Either you were in favour of saving more lives or you were prioritising the return of economic activity. There wasn’t much talk at the time about the mental health impacts of further restrictions, particularly among children, the elderly and those in lower socio-economic groups. Did the push for zero covid exercise unreasonable pressure on the government not to loosen up restrictions?
The role of the expert group, Nphet, also needs examining. Did it have proportionate power and was its decision making dominated by one or two individuals to the detriment of a greater spread of expertise? And then there is the government. Which factors fed into decision making? Was the fear of the next headline, scouting to avoid the next political attack, foremost in the cabinet’s collective mind?
In a properly functioning democracy, all of these matters, and others like medical resourcing and forward planning, would have been examined by now and recommendations made for the future. We have been promised an inquiry, but so far it sounds like it will be limited and is most certainly way too late. A complicating factor is that the main components of the government during the pandemic are still in power. The guiding instinct in this respect appears to be the same one that probably informed government thinking during the pandemic — political fear.
They fear being blamed. They fear political attack. They fear retrospectively having the deaths of some, or the psychological damage done to more, being laid at the cabinet table. Now is not the time for their fear.
The inquiry must be thorough, and must be broad and must take account of everything in order to ensure that the next time a more enlightened approach may inform any repeat. For that reason, it cannot be about apportioning blame, as it was to a large extent recently in England. The government needs to approach it with none of the distinctive defensiveness that they might ordinarily display towards such an examination of actions.
And the opposition and the media need to be onside and react not for headlines or political points, but in the long-term public interest. Without such a collective approach, any future fortification against a pandemic will result in the same kind of questions that are now being asked about how covid was handled.
