Gavan Reilly: Government more concerned about new variant than the one we already have

They might have to revise the old saying, you know. A week is a long time in epidemiology.

The emergence of omicron has unnerved those responsible for drawing up Ireland’s pandemic response. The sheer scale of the unknowns – how sick people might become, how quickly it spreads, whether our existing vaccines offer protection – puts our leaders in a bit of a bind.

Do they come down like a hammer and tongs on it now, and risk being later shown to have overreacted?

Or do they treat it based on the evidence to hand – that, though spreading more quickly, infections are relatively mild – and then get accused of allowing a repeat of last Christmas?

That was certainly the dilemma as offered by one senior government source to me yesterday morning. The tangible accounts of those who have treated omicron in South Africa are that the disease it causes, among both the vaccinated and unvaccinated, is fairly mild: instead of having a fever or a dry cough, patients are presenting with aches and pains and general exhaustion. Objectively, if a new virus emerged in non-Covid times with these symptoms, nobody would take very much notice. But southern African states where omicron has been found, also have quite low life expectancy.

Over-65s make up only 5% of South Africa’s population, and the life expectancy is only 64. Put simply, there isn’t a large population of older people for whom a vaccine-resistant strain is a big danger. In Europe, with life expectancy so much longer, the situation could be much different.

In those circumstances, the source said, the Irish government had to be quick off the mark. There would be general understanding if harsh measures were introduced now, then scrapped with the benefit of hindsight, but there would be no forgiving a government which allowed another variant through the gates like a Trojan horse.

In short, the mantra was act in haste, repent in leisure.

And yet, this apparently decisive approach towards the newly-classified variant also comes in the same week that the government is taking a curiously hands-off stance on the role of children.

The usual practice is that the letters written by Tony Holohan are only published by the government after they have been considered by Cabinet. If Tony writes a letter on a Thursday, and the government makes decisions at the following Tuesday’s meeting, it is only then that his advice will be formally published.

Last week turned that on its head. Holohan wrote to the government on Thursday to suggest that under-12s refrain from any indoor socialising outside home or school, with the letter then published on Friday.

Somebody in Government clearly decided that the advice needed to be formally communicated in the public domain in advance of the weekend. (It’s genuinely not a coincidence that the advice was issued before the Toy Show on Friday night: cousins having sleepovers to watch the show together is probably the exact sort of thing the CMO was looking to discourage.)

But his letter was not accompanied by an endorsement or imprimatur from anyone in government: it was just put out there, ambiguous in its authority, with ministers sitting on their hands and expecting the public to make whatever decision it saw best. Where did that leave us for the weekend? Were children’s dance classes or indoor sports or swimming still supposed to go ahead? Were Christmas pantos still supposed to continue even though the official advice was for children not to attend?

With the confusion that will probably have emerged by the time you get to read this - with children told no merely to scale back their socialising, but not to abandon it altogether - it’s worth remembering that the government has once again consciously diluted the advice of NPHET.

That of course is the government’s right - NPHET advises, Government decides - but try to cast your mind back a week to the days pre-omicron, when the big worry was how to bring our current Delta wave under control. If schooling is indispensable (and apparently ‘safe’), we can only assume the belief of the CMO and others is that unvaccinated children socialising outside the home is a bigger catalyst for the spread of the virus more generally.

If that was the basis for NPHET’s advice, and the government has diluted it for fear of having to formally shut the pantos, ministers ought to say so. But they shouldn’t try to tell us they’re being decisive in the face of a new threat, when the handling of the current one is so laissez-faire and people are being expected to make hard decisions without government guidance.

Put simply, there is little point in being so decisive against another variant when they seem so indecisive about the one we already have. If that indecision doesn’t bear fruit, Christmas 2021 will start looking a lot more ‘Meaningful’