How Is Ireland Doing?

How is Ireland doing with the pandemic? The short answer is: similar to California or sensible countries. 


If you would like to know what a government covid update from a sensible country looks like, here you go:

Ireland shut down in mid-March, and people stay home and minimize trips. The hospitals prepared for much worse and Ireland "flattened the curve" and so far the hospitals are coping. 

In the middle of March, the growth rate in the number of new cases stood at around 33%, meaning new cases were rising by a third every day.
This declined over March and April, and now Professor Nolan says that since the beginning of the month, the growth rate of new cases has been "effectively zero" and there has been "no growth in the disease for some weeks now." (RTE)

I read an article in the Guardian in mid-April that describes the Irish government's early actions and compares them to the Boris Johnson's approach in the UK. 

At the time of writing, 365 people have died in Ireland of Covid-19 and 11,329 have died in the UK. Adjusted for population, there have been 7.4 deaths in Ireland for every 100,000 people. In the UK, there have been 17 deaths per 100,000. In other words, people are dying of coronavirus in the UK at more than twice the rate they are dying in Ireland. Yet, despite Ireland being your closest neighbour, this has barely been mentioned in the British press.

In Ireland, we consume a great deal of British media. This means that we’ve been watching, with growing despair and grief, British news reports chronicling a national disaster. But for weeks now, long before the death rate accelerated, we’ve been watching and reading your reports with a queasy feeling. We knew of the measures and plans the Irish government was putting in place to protect us and we knew how far your government was slipping behind. 

When our taoiseach was closing our schools and universities, your prime minister was still telling you to wash your hands. When our government cancelled St Patrick’s Day celebrations, yours allowed the Cheltenham Festival to go ahead and, with it, a potentially massive multi-day super-spreading event of over 250,000 people. The contrast was disorientating. 

Nowhere was the dissonance more marked than on the weekend before St Patrick’s Day. By that point, Ireland had banned indoor gatherings of more than 100 people, but had stopped short of closing the pubs. A video showing revellers in Temple Bar went viral; a public outcry ensued; #closethepubs trended on Irish Twitter; the minister for health commented; and voluntary pub closures began the following morning.
That same weekend, thousands attended a gig in Cardiff. ... 

Technically, the UK went into lockdown before Ireland, on 23 March, but Ireland was already operating a “delay phase” from 12 to 27 March. I would argue that the crucial difference in approach lies in this two-week period from 9 March, when Ireland cancelled St Patrick’s Day, to 23 March, when the UK government finally initiated a lockdown. Because the Irish government moved quickly, we seem to have interrupted our pandemic’s exponential curve at an earlier point. In mid-March, our models forecast 3,000 new coronavirus cases a day by the end of the month. In reality, we had a daily increase of less than 300, one-tenth of that predicted. Our government’s measures worked.

Like everywhere else, all gatherings and festivals are cancelled which means there'll be no Cork Women's Fun Weekend, Tidy Towns competition, or Rose of Tralee. The National Ploughing Championship is probably off too— 300,000 attended last year; it's a big deal. 

The Irish Times provides a current dashboard, and RTE a county-by-county breakdown. There's been more than 400 cases in Donegal. 

On Friday, the leader of Sinn Fein Mary Lou McDonald appeared on the Late, Late Show and described her recent illness and recovery from covid. 

As I mentioned earlier, Ireland is between governments at the moment, and although the two main rival parties have been trying to negotiate a government together, they don't have the votes to close the deal. And they refuse to negotiate with Mary Lou, whose party won just as many votes as they did. I'm thankful that the government is able to function as well as it is, given the disarray. I think this governmental system, with its single parliament and proportional voting might just be better than our own. 

Unemployment is at 22%, and the government is sending out checks to individuals and small businesses. (Not actual checks, because unlike the US, Ireland part of the EU and its modern banking systems. The government deposits money into bank accounts directly, and politicians don't sign "checks.") 

Like Santa Cruz, we live near a beach popular with tourists, and many folks from Belfast and other cities in Northern Ireland have holiday homes here. Over Easter weekend the gardes turned away thousands at the border, but they came in via back roads. 

This video is only available on facebook, but is worth watching for its beautiful views of Donegal, and expression of the typical Irish attitude of those of us in quarantine here. (Includes the f-word.)

Speaking of a functioning government, I saw that they are extending expiring visas for two months, as no one can travel internationally. This may apply to us, when the time comes this summer. 

Until then, we are like you, at home. We're grand. 

Dublin airport.