We've been conservative i think mate - pardon the pun - we went with with a very risk averse approach early doors and continue along that vain. We've been decent enough with patience and general social compliance as well. We didnt take any risks and continue not to, all the while waiting and watching elsewhere to see what works and how we can apply it. No point being a hero and playing games of chance with the loss of human life. Really if we had less conservative politicians we might have moved to phase 1 on this Tues and opened up a little, but the two week extension just gives us that bit extra time to prepare and make sure. I think we are taking advantage of our position in Western Europe and seeing how opening up in central Europe is going and will learn lessons around that in the next two weeks. We are also hoping to have the capacity to do - 100k tests a day in two weeks - even if its unlikely we will need that many. We're doing well at the moment with cases dropping day on day.
A worry going on, is sharing a border with the UK, we have seen a spike of cases in the border counties, Cavan and Mongahan, with day trippers coming over the border and back - different jurisdictions and it is creating problems in health and policing. Going on if we open say the likes of shops, pubs and restaurants and the UK dont we could be flooded with people being pulled south from the North, were we have no jurisdiction over health etc. But such is living in Ireland.
We made mistakes - residential care settings particularly, but genuinely trying to rectify these now and salvage what is salvageable with an acknowledgement we dropped the ball.
I wouldn't be to fool hardy though or self congratulatory now, dealing with this virus is like a game of snakes and ladders, just as soon as you go up a ladder you can be knocked back at any stage stepping on a snake. Personally i think locking down a country is easy, i think its far harder and there there are huge risks involved in opening up again incrementally. That will separate many governments from the herd of just blanket lock-downs as a way of managing this. The winter is going to be difficult, a concern would be a flu and covid duel outbreak - which could be carnage and will be a real challenge for our health services.
While id share a lot of your opinions on how the government have dealt with this in the UK and their morality and political, values and motivation behind many of their decisions, its been a week of acknowledgement and progress - more so then any other week - strides have been in getting a testing strategy and a response into care homes - hopefully both those things come off, they've been painfully slow bordering on incompetent on the broad management of this - with a horrffic human cost, but better late then never on these measures and i really hope the UK progress from here.
I think the slow response by the UK government over a coherent multifaceted holisitic strategy to this across a range of settings will delay things for the UK as they are late to many of the particular "best practice" parties. If the testing strategy comes of it could really help. On reflection i think the UK and to a lesser extent us, prioritised the acute setting and the UK particularly panicked and front loaded everything into hospitals very narrowly (maybe not unreasonably), other settings like the community and care homes less so and is only now starting to deal with the issues there. The chain of infection starts in the community, if you dont deal with the growth of the virus at source its not going to get ease in hospitals or ultimately. The UK are late to that and other parties but at lest they've shined their shoes this weeks.
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