The Cedar Lounge Revolution

The Irish plan to move on from lock-down… April 10, 2020

Pat Leahy in the IT today argues that:

The restarting of house and commercial building is seen as particularly important, with Ibec data showing that the construction sector accounts for more than 9 per cent of private sector employment.
Much of the manufacturing sector was judged as essential and remains open, but non-essential manufacturing would be likely to reopen early. Any sectors reopening would be expected to be able to guarantee appropriate social distancing for employees.
The Government might also consider the early reopening of non-essential retail outlets – everything from clothes shops to garden centres – and some offices, although working from home will be encouraged where possible.

And:

It is not clear how soon locations in which people gather – such as restaurants and pubs ­– might be allowed to reopen, but these are likely to be in a later phase.
As is happening in other countries which are considering reopening, large public gatherings are likely to be banned for some time, and this may be contingent on how early measures go.

But perhaps an indication that matters are far from there as they stand:

The chair of the coronavirus expert advisory group at the National Virus Reference Laboratory has said we cannot be complacent about the dangers of Covid-19 because “given the opportunity this virus will run rampant”.

He said it is hoped restrictions can lifted in the “next couple of weeks” but we cannot be complacent about the dangers of Covid-19.

Dr Cillian De Gascun said “we are not going to return to a normal state of affairs” soon.

Signs of Hope – A continuing series April 10, 2020

Gewerkschaftler suggested this recently:

I suggest this blog should have a regular (weekly) slot where people can post happenings at the personal or political level that gives them hope that we’re perhaps not going to hell in a handbasket as quickly as we thought. Or as the phlegmatic Germans put it “hope dies last”.

Any contributions this week?

That British plan to move on from lockdown… April 10, 2020

The Guardian reports:

Ministers are looking at ending the coronavirus lockdown with a “gradual sector-by-sector approach” that could see vital industries such as manufacturing get back to work before less critical ones like entertainment, according to Whitehall sources.

Who would have thought it?

Thought this is telling in so many ways:

But they said it was more possible than other ideas that have been floated in recent days, such as letting 20 to 30-year-olds go back to their normal lives before older people.

So how would that work given the age stratification of the workforce. And what does it tell us about vulnerability to the virus according to age cohorts?

As to when it might end in the UK?

One official said some Tory ministers and advisers have been pushing for the lockdown to end sooner rather than later, but that the current thinking was that it would have to last for another six to eight weeks.

That world is gone… April 10, 2020

I was reading this in the IT from Cliff Taylor about ways out of the shutdown. His sense is, and I think it’s reasonable, that only when health is clearly not going to be impacted is a serious opening up likely. And he argues:

As workplace start to reopen, significant responsibility will fall on employers. Social distancing will need to be a factor in all workplaces – and this may be difficult on some construction sites or less-automated production lines.
There may be some difficult employee issues – for example in relation to who can and who cannot return to work in the first wave – both for economic and health reasons. Will you be asked to return home if you have an elevated temperature?
Public-facing businesses will also be expected to control numbers and queues to ensure social distancing, as food stores are doing now.
Rigorous cleaning will be needed in all workplaces and in some cases protective clothing may be needed for those undertaking this.

And he continues that certain sectors, those where large crowds gather, or even medium sized and smaller ones, pubs and so forth, etc, are likely to be very heavily curtailed for quite some time to come.

Almost predictably below the line there’s a chorus of outrage. Samples being ‘Until we accept people will die, possibly even myself , we will only dig a bigger hole, especially economically’ or ‘We cannot continue in lockdown, borrowing billions to pay people to stay away from work. The policy was for 2 weeks, longer is utterly nuts. We must open some shops and business premises after Easter. The fact is that the median age of death has been 80 all week’ and similar.

What’s fascinating to me is that the economics, or if one prefers the practicalities, underpinning those comments are so wide of the mark. Because it only takes a few seconds thought to realise that the situation has changed completely.

How could workers be persuaded to return to workplaces where the potential for dire outcomes was very real? The example of bus drivers is educative, and they are absolutely right to demand very high protections. Are teachers going to want to go back into classrooms when the risk of infection is high? Likewise with health workers and medical facilities. I know people working in ordinary everyday private sector employments who are taking huge precautions. They’re not going to accept anything less than that a fortnight or a month from now if matters stand as they do. How on earth can international travel start up in that context either? Even if the former were achievable, that shops and so on opened up, we would still face basic realities that our international tourism sector was going to be dormant. And that’s to put to one side entirely the question of how the virus, presumably still sweeping through the society if we opened up any time soon, would impact on medical resources. Or the political impact of same.

But for those writing those comments it is as if everything can be reset to, well, December 2019. That’s not going to happen. Not now, not soon and possibly not ever.

What is wrong with these people? April 10, 2020

The Guardian has a piece on how the US right continues to try to minimise the deaths from the virus.

But several media figures who are sympathetic to the president have started to question the official death toll, claiming it is being distorted for political purposes, by including in the statistics people dying of other causes.

It’s both depressing and fascinating. One has to wonder is it a perfect example of avoidance? It’s as if these folk just can’t get their heads around the reality. A reality that, in fact according to those interview in the piece, is likely to be much much worse than that outlined by the right.

“They just have to go into government… “ April 9, 2020

Speaking of cognitive dissonance, it’s highly entertaining to hear from various quarters the line that the SDs, or GP or on occasion the LP, ‘have to go into a government’ with FF and FG given those two larger parties have been adamant in ruling SF out as a partner for government. Somehow the ‘national interest’ functions in only one way, that is with regard to the smaller parties, and not in relation to forging an agreement with SF and a.n.others.

There’s also some curious analyses, for example, take this from Pat Leahy at the weekend where he argued:

I can’t quite decide whether the Green Party’s reluctance to enter government stems from political opportunism or just a lack of courage. Whichever it is, the party is turning its back on an opportunity to bring about a step change in climate policy and wield unprecedented power at the centre of government across a range of policy areas. Given that the recent election demonstrated pretty unequivocally that Irish voters don’t give much of a hoot about climate change, I wonder when the Greens think they’ll get a chance like this again.

Well perhaps (some, perhaps many of) the GP think that this isn’t much of an opportunity at all given their last experience of government with FF and suspect that a government with FF/FG might actually be substantively worse for them. After all, they wound up with no TDs at all after that experience. It then took them two elections and almost a decade to rebuild and exceed their original position. Why do precisely the same again and to what end?

Furthermore they might consider that the likelihood of progressive outcomes on the environment will be much more difficult to achieve in the context of what promises to be a very very difficult economic period once the crisis subsides.

Which is ironic because in almost the same breath Leahy pivots to making much the same argument, but this time in relation to SF!

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are edging towards a deal that will become real in a few weeks if the pandemic does not turn into an Italian-style disaster and destroy the current government and any chance of a similar successor. If the worst happens, as noted hereabouts before, our politics will change rapidly and radically. For one thing, the exclusion of Sinn Féin is unlikely to be sustainable in that scenario. I wonder if the party views this prospect with much enthusiasm.

Isn’t that a massive contradiction. On the one hand tempt in the GP and whoever to an FF/FG coalition because of the unparalleled opportunities to effect change. On the other rain on SF’s parade in relation to participation because of the difficult times ahead. One or other of those argument may well be wrong but functionally for the parties being seen as making up numbers they cannot be in such stark contradiction to one another as regards outcomes.

Leahy suggests that the arithmetic for government is such that either we have FF/FG and a.n.others, or we have FF or FG and SF and a.n.others and therefore while ‘ This puts the small parties in a potentially pivotal position; it confers great power on them right now. They seem to be intent on fleeing from it.’

But of course they do. Because those are two very different forms of coalition, even if many of us on the left would shy away from recommending SF and others engage with either FF or FG. In one the smaller parties and SF would have much greater weight, albeit insufficient for many of us. In the other the smaller parties would be overwhelmed by FF/FG. Small wonder the former parties are saying no thanks to participation with FF/FG. And it is this that points up why is last paragraph is so wide of the mark.

Of course no party that is thinking of the next election should go into government right now. The prospects for such an administration are beyond daunting. Only those that actually want to play a part in rebuilding the country, in making it a better place, in bettering the lives of its citizens, in sacrificing their political fortunes for the public good, should apply for this one. The queue is not exactly a long one. Sometimes, you’d wonder what the election was about after all.

But if that is true, then why aren’t FF or FG attempting to carve out a deal with SF and others?

Social isolation… April 9, 2020

That’s in a way the strangest sentence I’ve ever read in the news.

Too soon… April 9, 2020

It’s beginning to irritate me, the muted calls for things to ‘return to normal’ or for ‘some sort of hope’. Because it displays a misunderstanding of what is actually taking place. Take for example this from the IT yesterday morning…

This is our lead story this morning. I’m afraid it is bad news for those who expect the Government to lift the restrictions as was planned on Easter Sunday.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/coronavirus-restrictions-set-to-be-extended-as-citizens-warned-against-social-sabotage-at-easter-1.4223853

Or more seriously again:

Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has told a party meeting that the public may need to be told when the restrictions introduced to deal with the coronavirus crisis will be lifted.
Mr Martin made the comments during a conference call with his senators and MEPs on Wednesday morning, which discussed the Covid-19 crisis and government formation.
Senator Pat Casey told the meeting that the public needed to be given hope about when restrictions will be lifted, alongside the warnings given recently and the extra powers of enforcement given to An Garda Síochána.

Does Martin not understand that any such public statement would be impossible to make at this sage of the pandemic. There’s a basic truth. It is impossible to accurately predict the manner in which these matters will go at this point, other than to say the number of infections and deaths will increase.
Moreover the situation has arrived at this point:

The intensive care unit (ICU) in Dublin’s Mater Hospital is full, with some patients being moved to the high dependency unit, a senior doctor there has said. The hospital’s Director of Critical Care Medicine, Dr Cormac O’Loughlin, said most of those in the ICU beds are Covid-19 patients adding that the biggest challenge in the treatment of them will be staffing problems.

That latter reality is soberly conveyed in the following, also from the IT:

Dr Jack Lambert, a consultant in infectious diseases at Mater hospital has described data published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), at the University of Washington in the US as “misinformation provided by outsides based on inaccurate numbers and data.”

According to the IHME data Ireland has passed its peak of Covid-19 infections but can expect a total death toll of more than 400 virus-related fatalities by next month.

That modelling is based on inaccurate numbers and data, Dr Lambert told the Pat Kenny show on Newstalk. “I don’t think we’ve reached the peak yet. That is misinformation provided by outsiders. We haven’t reached our peak and we may have a second peak.
“We have to wait day by day, the accurate numbers are deaths and ICU admissions and they continue to rise.”

For all the good weather, for all the chafing, the actual danger from the virus facing this state and this island continues as before. Nothing has changed in that regard even if the figures are lower than those projected earlier in the crisis. Paul Cullen in the IT who (ironically) trailed the IHME report far too prominently, at least gets it right in the following:

It is abundantly clear from international evidence at this stage that social distancing works as a mechanism for slowing the spread of this virus.
Equally, it is clear that the widespread adherence to the social distancing measures implemented in Ireland has worked to curb the spread of disease here.
We have seen the rate of growth of new cases fall from 33 per cent a day to under 10 per cent since the restrictions were introduced…

Though oddly wrong in the next part…

Another way of measuring our progress is counting deaths. These hit 22 last Friday, but totals for the last three days have been lower. While it is hard with such small numbers to start mapping a curve there is no sign as yet of an exponential rise in deaths, and this despite the problems in nursing homes where the oldest and most exposed population are at risk.

Actually Tuesday saw the largest number of fatalities from the virus. This is a long haul, not a short one.

Cognitive dissonance on the crisis…. April 8, 2020

Read this over the weekend:

A second senior UK government adviser, the chief pandemic modeller Graham Medley, told The Times newspaper he feared Britain had painted itself in a corner with no clear exit from a strategy that will damage the economic and mental well-being of much of the population.

And there’s bits and pieces online where you can build up a better sense of his thesis. What I find odd is the idea that this ‘will damage the economic and mental well-being of much the population’. Note that economic is placed ahead of mental.

But what I find particularly jarring is when one looks at the headline for the piece on RTÉ that references it (by the way this is not a dig at RTÉ, it’s simply reporting the statements). There were 708 deaths reported on Saturday. What about the impact of that on the mental well-being? That’s a truly scarifying figure and it is one that is likely to be repeated, or worse, daily for some time. Or the situation in relation to the Prime Minister. And it’s this weird detachment that is particularly evident in the UK (but also elsewhere admittedly amongst some) in the face of such numbers. And although figures for ‘ordinary’ flu fluctuate, already in the space of a very very few days, relatively speaking, these figures for the virus are, should they be sustained, very high indeed (and keep in mind ‘ordinary’ flu is across a year as distinct from this ‘surge’).

Take the reality described here:

According to the WHO, current evidence on the new coronavirus suggests 15% of all illnesses are severe infections, requiring oxygen, and 5% are critical infections requiring ventilation. These levels are “higher than what is observed for influenza infection”.