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The Corona Files: It wasn’t me, says the Pangolin!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
The Corona Files: It wasn’t me, says the Pangolin!

One of the most asked questions about the Coronavirus is where it came from and there are a number of theories that have various degrees of plausibility. One of them is really interesting because it introduces something new.

One of the theories is the official Chinese series of events, the other one is the one that the CIA has now adopted and that Trump will use to put penalty taxes on Chinese goods again and then there is the third one, an interesting one that thinks a little outside the box.

The Chinese Version

The Chinese Version that the communist party of China peddled as the official story from the beginning talks about a Coronavirus that came from a horseshoe bat (their face looks a little like a horseshoe). From that bat, the virus jumped to an intermediate animal and the Chinese said it was a Pangolin and from there it was transferred to humans in a wet market in Wuhan where Pangolin meat was sold. Apart from bats, Pangolins are the only mammals reported to date that have been found to be infected with a coronavirus that is related to Sars-Cov-2.

The problem with this story is that no virus was isolated from the wet market in Wuhan, instead the Chinese authorities destroyed all evidence as quickly as possible and refused to let any external (or internal) experts to check the evidence before they closed the market and disinfected it. This is like going to a murder scene with barrels of bleach before you let the crime scene investigator have a look.

Interestingly the Chinese authorities seemingly didn’t even let their own experts from the “Wuhan Institute of Virology” look for the virus on the market. The “Wuhan Institute of Virology” is one of the top experts in Coronaviruses.

The Lab Version

But the presence of the “Wuhan Institute of Virology” that explicitly was researching the Coronaviruses in the same city where the first recorded Coronavirus case was discovered raises huge suspicions and many, including US President Trump and the CIA, are certain that the virus came from this institute and either was “freed” intentionally or accidentally. The institute particularly researched into the possibility of bat to human transfer without an intermediate host. The head of the Coronavirus research at the institute, Shi Zhengli, was talking about Coronaviruses and this possible direct transfer not too long ago and in addition one of the researchers from the “Wuhan Institute of Virology”, Huang Yan Ling, who some think might have been Patient Zero, has disappeared since the start of the pandemic. She could have died and her name was removed from the Institute’s website.

Here is a story that appeared in the Scientific American about what happened regarding the virus outbreak and the Institute: www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/

It outlines that the genomic sequence of the virus that was found in the first patients didn’t match the sequences of the viruses Shi Zhengli’s team had sampled from bat caves. But at the same time, it was confirmed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was 96% identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had found in horseshoe bats in Yunnan.

But oddly Yunnan about 1800km away from Wuhan! So how did this virus make it from the Yunann province to Wuhan without causing the same havoc as it caused in the city of Wuhan or the province of Hubei?

Nobody seemingly has a good answer! Maybe it was a traveling Pangolin?? :-O

Why is the Pangolin in this story?

The intermediary host is not absolutely required, it could be possible that the virus from the bat directly went to human beings. But bats and human beings are quite different and this virus was particularly “prepared” to transmit fast between human beings, so virologists think that it had to adjust to mammals that are closer to us before it could be so infectious. The poor Pangolin gets the blame, because the SARS-CoV-2 virus was found in some Pangolins, but they might not at all have been the intermediary.

Was the virus man-made?

A number of virologists who have analysed the genomic sequence have excluded that possibility. They said there are certain unusual features in the genomic sequence that would be odd for man-made viruses and they are therefore convinced that it was a natural transmission. But everything is still possible. We just don’t know enough yet.

An argument for the man-made nature was the spike protein that can be found in the virus. It was said that that HAS to be man-made, but in the meantime that spike protein concept was found in natural viruses., which reduced the small probability further.

What other intermediary host is possible?

If it wasn’t the Pangolin, another intermediary host could have been the environment in which the SARS-CoV-2 virus got ready for its damage in humans and it is possible that over a few weeks or months it jumped a number of times between the host animal and human beings to fine tune the mechanism, so to speak. A suitable animal would be either a pig OR a dog or cat, because they are a) living close to us and b) are genetically closer to us than Pangolins.

And one specific animal that could have been involved is a Racoon Dog that is bred in China for its fur and the biggest breeding location is Wuhan! :-O The Racoon Dog and the dog keepers/breeders could have swapped the the virus a few times giving the virus time to adjust to human beings, before it then started spreading between human beings.

Here is an outline of the Racoon Dog theory www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/raetsel-um-herkunft-des-coronavirus-stammt-das-virus-aus-dem-marderhund/25775352.html (in German)

What do we know?

We know the virus is from bats. We know it made it to human beings and we know that it either was transferred directly or via a host animal.
We also know that the Chinese authorities were anything else but upfront and honest. We know that they wanted to suppress information and do not want to take any blame.
But we also know that the CIA is highly untrustworthy and has an agenda in all actions and that Trump would very much appreciate a new reason to harass China with.

Interestingly the Australian and the British secret services do not agree with the CIA’s story about the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They seem to think that the USA is as motivated to change the truth as China is.

We also know that virologists are scientists and are not necessarily experts in Secret Service politics and also do not necessarily know everything about how a virus could have been made to look like it has been made by nature instead of being man-made.

Where does that leave us?

It leaves us very much in the dark! We know we can’t trust nobody and we know that we can’t find out ourselves.

The racoon dog option would be a nice explanation, but it is just grasping for straws. I could easily see some sort of accidental escape of the virus from the Institute of Virology as plausible, but what do I know!

The total control aspect

One thing concerns me and it is in this context NOT Bill Gates or 5G or Anthony Fauci! The Chinese government and the communist party who is the government got under a lot of pressure towards the end of last year due to the protests in Hongkong and we know from the situation in East Germany that totalitarian governments have to be VERY afraid of civil unrest. So shutting that protest down and at the same time increasing the control of their own people would be extremely convenient for the Chinese government.

The introduction of the tracing app that became mandatory in China to enter public buildings and shops and even public transport is a brilliant tool to totally control their citizens and could not have been introduced for ANY other reason without some opposition. The RAPID introduction in a very efficient way despite the massive size of the country and the huge data and processing requirements could indicate that a LOT was prepared and ready to go. The relative regional limitation of the virus epidemic also is a little odd when you compare it to what happened in other countries.

So if you want to believe a scenario whereby the virus was intentionally used to cause havoc to introduce severe population control mechanism, you can find heaps of plausible indicators for this theory.

Either way, it seems that the Pangolin is definitely innocent!

[The title photo is from the Flickr stream of David Brossard shared under Creative Commons licensing: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/]

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Bewley’s screwed up, it wasn’t the landlord

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Bewley’s screwed up, it wasn’t the landlord

Bewley's Cafe

Bewley’s Cafe will close for good, we found out on 06 May and soon the chorus of “greedy landlord” started together with the wish to save Bewley’s cafe.

But as so often there are some facts that are not clearly obvious that need to be considered:

In a starring role, there is developer and landlord Johnny Ronan and the other main actors are the Campbell Family, who own the Bewley’s Cafes and Campbell Catering.

Johnny Ronan is a hugely successful developer, who has his fingers in nearly all relevant property pies in Dublin. He went down in 2008 and was bailed out by NAMA – or rather by all of us Irish tax payers – and he has recovered like Phoenix from the ashes afterwards. Kudos for his regained success, but it is difficult to “like” someone like that who is only able to make his huge personal gains again because we paid his significant debts. And I would also not be surprised if the tag “greedy” might be totally justified.

Johnny Ronan bought Bewley’s Cafe in Grafton Street from Royal Liver a few years ago and is renting it to the Campbell family for allegedly 1.5mio per year. And it is the public’s opinion that it is this massive rent cost that is the reason for the Bewley’s Cafe closure and because we all seem to love the national treasure that Bewley’s Cafe is seen as – although many of us would NEVER go there for their cofe and pastries! – the conclusion is Landlord = Bad, Tenant = Good!

Not exactly the truth, though!

So what is the real picture:

The Bewley’s family started the Bewley’s company in 1840 and they opened the Cafe in Grafton Street in 1927. They bought the building at some point and owned it. Campbell Catering bought struggling Bewley’s at the end of the 1980s and consequently they owned the building in Grafton Street then and that is where the trouble starts.

To get some money into the company, in their wisdom, the Campbell family decided to sell the Grafton St building and lease it back. It is a silly accounting “trick” that gets you cash in the short term, but ignores that you will pay a big rent over the years, especially if the location is such a prime spot in the main city centre shopping area.

In 2007 then there was a rent review and it seems that the Campbell family was ok with 1.5 mio, but the story continues. Just two years before the rent review Bewley’s closed for a while (they seemed to have done this a number of time in the last few years) and during that time allegedly Zara offered a yearly rent of EUR 2 mio. Not sure if they would have been allowed to do that, but Campbell could have continued paying the rent of 1.5 mio to the landlord and on the other side take 2 mio from Zara. BUT Campbell was not interested in that offer.

The landlord even offered them then 6 mio if they got out! But Campbell was still not interested.

In 2014 Bewley’s closed again for renovation and it remained closed for nearly three (!!) years and a whopping 12 mio was spent on the internal works to turn it from a 180 seat cafe to a 500 seat cafe. (I wrote about the challenge back then www.joergsteegmueller.com/2017/11/03/bewleys-cafe-has-re-opened-but-will-it-work/).

So you see that the landlord (Johnny Ronan or his company Ickendel) doesn’t deserve any medals for anything they did, but they also are not really the reason why Campbell is closing the Cafe now. Campbell made a number of decisions over the years that could have helped them to leave the seemingly unmanageable burden behind, but they decided against it.

The final decision now is solely Campbell’s responsibility and there is no justification for a “Save Bewley’s campaign” or anything like that. It is pity that Bewley’s Cafe will close, it was an icon in Dublin and will be missed, but I haven’t been in there for many many years, so I didn’t help to keep it open and therefore I can’t complain. I just hope that no Starbucks will move in! We have more than enough of them! :-O

This article outlines some parts of the story:
www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/row-tied-to-20-year-lease-agreed-when-bewley-s-sold-grafton-street-to-raise-cash-1.1852021

 

(The title picture is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license and it was taken by Miguel Mendez.)

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The Corona Files: Covid is staying … get used to it!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
The Corona Files: Covid is staying … get used to it!

No Vaccine for Covid-19?

People in Ireland are a friendly bunch, and dealing with others on a first name basis is absolutely normal (apart from in very formal settings). So, since Covid-19 has moved in and isn’t leaving soon, let’s call it by its first name. Hi Covid! Welcome to Ireland!

How does reading that feel in your gut? For many, this might feel VERY uncomfortable. Imagine welcoming British doctor and serial killer of at least 218 people, Harold Shipmann (www.biography.com/crime-figure/harold-shipman), with a “Welcome to Ireland, Harold!”. It just doesn’t feel right!

But during the week, I listened to my daily schedule of virology podcasts and one of the doctors said something really interesting. He said: “Many of us think that the flu is harmless, but this is completely wrong. The flu (also known as “influenza” virus) is a dangerous and often deadly disease.” He then continued to explain that the flu spreads quite fast, it kills people (often through pneumonia) if they are in a high-risk-groups (i.e. have underlying illnesses or are of advanced age) and it can “get us” at any time between October and March.

If some aliens landed on Earth and you told them about the flu, they probably would be VERY VERY afraid. But for us Earthlings, the flu is NORMALITY. We got used to it and it is nothing we think overly about. You probably had it at some stage and you might even know people that died from it. (Although it was probably said that they died of pneumonia or something else that was caused by the flu. It is unlikely that someone said that that person died of the flu.)

But despite that deadly disease (flu!) among us, we do not change our behaviour much during the flu season. MOST of us have never been vaccinated against the flu, at least not if you are young-ish or not in a healthcare profession or risk group. If it hits us we take it on the chin, are out of action for a few days and then go back to work when it is over.

And there are other dangerous and life threatening things that we willingly accept in our lives. Car accidents, plane crashes, smoking, drinking, overeating, “under exercising” and many other things kill people on a daily basis and we all have directly or indirectly been affected or at least know someone who has directly or indirectly been affected. But we still don’t freak out too much over it.

I have no intention to compare the number of deaths and claim that Covid is harmless, it isn’t! But what struck me when I heard the virologist talk about the “normality” of the influenza in our life was the fact that the presence of Covid might just become a new normality! :-O

A yearly or even permanent risk that has to be minimised by certain actions (like using seat belts when in a car), but something we will get used to (because will HAVE to get used to)! And in a few years, it might just be normal to talk about Covid as we talk about the flu today.

Someone born in Ireland today, has an average life expectancy of 81.5 years. This is an average, no promise and certainly no guarantee and many do not reach that age. But in 1960, the average life expectancy in Ireland was just 69.80 years. And in 1946 it was below 60 and in 1900 even below 50. Imagine, on average you only lived until 50 if you were born in 1900! That is a very young death from our point of view today. (Source: www.esr.ie/article/view/730/157)

So from 1900-2020 we removed so many risks and dangers and we improved the health system so much that it resulted in an increase of the life expectancy of more than 30 years. That is a big achievement, but nothing that was guaranteed. If we are honest, we expected that it would continue to go up and up and we NEVER considered that there could be a setback.

Covid might have changed this and will probably put a dent in the graph!

However, it is still completely normal that we will have to die one day and that fact will not change – at least for another long while. What Covid has done is that it has added another risk factor to our lives and my prediction is that we will get used to it

So the real question today is not “How much longer will it take until I can go back to work again?” The real question is “What do we have to do to continue life with this new normality?”.

This might be a worrying thought initially, but think for a moment about all the risks that we are prepared to accept in our lives already and ask yourself WHY we are prepared to accept these risks. And then think about how you might be able to accept this new and added risk.

So, Covid is here to stay! Now we have to find a way to get used to it! …and at the same time again try to reduce the risk of a new danger while still continuing our lives.

——————————————

And just to pre-empt that question: No, we are not doing that at the moment! Currently the politicians and doctors in Ireland are trying to REMOVE the risk and therefore have decided to lock us in for another while. They are talking about lifting the restrictions “when it is safe”. But this is not the solution for the future if you accept that it might never be safe. It is like saying “We will let you use your car again when it is safe.” or “We will let you smoke again when it is safe.”

And a final warning: Do not hang all your hope on the discovery of a vaccine! There is still no 100% effective vaccine for Influenza A or Influenza B. Pharmaceutical companies guess every year which strand might break out and combine bits of a number of strands in a vaccine to hopefully cover the one that will hit us that year.
Also, there has never been a vaccine for SARS-1 or for MERS and Covid, which is SARS-2, will most likely mutate so much as well year after year, that there might never be a 100% effective vaccine. Oh, and remember, there is also NO “vaccine” against most cancer types despite them being around for so many years and despite their devastating effect on the life expectancy graph! So it is definitely possible that there will never be a 100% effective vaccine.

And that is another reason why we have to think about this new normality in a way where there is no going back to the old normality.

Corona Virus, Health System, , , , , ,

The Corona Files: Can we trust our leaders in this crisis?

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
1 Comment
The Corona Files: Can we trust our leaders in this crisis?

[This post got a bit longer than planned and you might not have the time to read the whole post, but I can promise you that it is worth it, because there is some amazing and unheard of news towards the end of it!]

After more than a month in “lockdown”, with a significantly changed infection rate and considering what is happening in other countries, it is now time to think about the trust we can or should have in the politicians in Ireland to do the right thing.

While the picture here is by far not as shocking as in the USA, where Trump suggested to put UV light “inside people” to kill the virus or maybe to inject disinfectant (www.youtube.com/watch?v=33QdTOyXz3w) so that the virus dies, we still need to keep a close eye on what is done with our lives and to us by the people who are in power.

Because I do believe that we are dealing with a virus, a virus that is more dangerous than other viruses (I will write another time about THAT discussion and the Conspiracy Theories that are connected to it.), I do think that the soft-ish lockdown that we were put under, was the right thing to do.

But I am wondering of the people in charge are the right ones to get us out again.

Who is in charge?

First let’s have a look at the power structure in Ireland to see who is really in charge right now.

It seems that the following people and organisations/forums are on this list: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Health Minister Simon Harris, National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET), Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan and maybe also Professor Philip Nolan, who is leading the modelling team.

This is an interesting list for many reasons:
The majority of people on it are seemingly un-elected and are employees or subcontractors of the Department of Health. It seems to be really difficult to find out who is part of the NPHET (I wasn’t able to!) and the NPHET doesn’t release any minutes of their meetings anymore. But it seems that the two elected politicians (Don’t worry, I will come to that!), Varadkar and Harris, leave ALL or nearly all decisions to the NPHET. Alan Kelly, the Labour leader, has some justified concerns about NPHET: www.thejournal.ie/taoiseach-nphet-alan-kelly-5082184-Apr2020/

In a setup like this, there is a huge risk that experts are experts ONLY in their area, but don’t really see/understand or want to care about any other aspects of their decisions. You probably know the saying, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

Because a modeller cares very much about his models and a Chief Medical Officer cares very much about the medical aspects of this pandemic, they definitely have to be PART of the advisory group, but after that should it not be the elected politicians that carry the responsibility and also then make the decisions and announce the decisions?

Yes (I am getting to that now!), I am fully aware that neither Harris nor Varadkar are confirmed in their roles after the recent election. And strictly speaking, they lost the election and would have to get re-elected or re-appointed before they are confirmed in their roles. However, they are – according to the Irish Constitution – rightly and correctly continuing in their roles until a new Taoiseach is elected and a new Minister of Health has been appointed.

On the way into the lockdown, I think they did do the right thing and performed well. But a critic could say that the getting into a lockdown is easy and you can’t do much wrong, the way out of the lockdown is MUCH more complicated and requires completely different leadership.

I am not convinced that the people in power are the right ones to get us out of the lockdown. The Chief Medical Officer will be judged by the only statistic he focuses on on a daily basis: Number of newly infected and number of deaths. The Modelling expert, only looks at the virus reproduction number R (and surprisingly for an expert he seemingly doesn’t understand that R0 and R are not the same!! R0 is the max reproduction number and R or Reff is the REAL reproduction number. Prof Nolan got it wrong here www.gov.ie/en/publication/ea86cc-covid-19-modelling-data-thursday-16-april-2020/). And if you are judged by ONE specific result or number, then naturally you only focus on that one single issue and tend to loose sight of any other issues.

So who will look at the other effects and impacts? There are social, mental, economic, educational and political impacts as well.

This is the sphere were politicians need to make decisions, but to do that, they might have to tell the medics and modellers that they appreciate their advise but might choose not to follow it for now and do we think Varadkar and Harris would do that? I don’t think Harris would and I am not too sure about Varadkar.

NO politician anywhere in Europe or even worldwide KNOWS what to do in the current situation, so we can’t be tooo harsh with our judgement. No medic or modeller really has reliable and 100% correct data! Apart from the number of deaths, everything else is pure guess work. We have NO idea how many people have been infected. We don’t even know exactly how the infections happen and why some people have a weak reaction and others have a strong reaction to an infection. So all the people in power are totally winging it! Not only in Ireland, but worldwide.

So what can be done? In my opinion, we should watch closely what is happening in other countries. Austria, Germany, Denmark and Czech (and a few more) are starting to ease the restrictions and our politicians should look at that to 50% and listen to the experts with the other 50%.

But this expert forum has to change now! Medics and modellers are still needed, but in addition we need to add people that know about mental health, that are experts in education and in economy. The expert group that will ADVISE our politicians (not lead instead of the politicians) has to spread wider and cover more bases.

How come I dare to say that? Do I think that all the deaths are not real? Do I think that we are over the hospital emergency?
No, I do not think that at all! What our health care workers experience is definitely real and we definitely need to continue the work on easing the pressure they are under.

But we also need to be aware that Covid-19 is not the only health issue in this country. There are people avoiding hospitals that urgently should be seen and possibly operated. And we need to take into account that there is NO good justification for some of the restrictions and the renewed clamping down that gardai have announced for this coming weekend. There is a good justification for the physical distance, but NOT for the 2km radius for exercise and also not for the travel limitations (as long as you continue to keep the physical distance wherever you go to).

And if business life doesn’t continue in some shape of form, we will NOT be able to pay for the out of work aid that is being paid at the moment and we will NOT even be able to keep financing the hospitals. Heck, we were not able to finance hospitals sufficiently to avoid overcrowding when the economy was going well, so how can it be possible when the economy has stopped?

I am NOT talking about a “getting back to normality”, but I am talking about moving out of emergency shutdown mode into a emergency handling mode in the same way as these other European countries do it.

And YES, it could happen that we will get back into lockdown mode again for another 2 weeks or so. Maybe even a few times. And that is absolutely ok, but we now need to work on a plan for getting out and I am not sure we can trust the people who are currently in charge to have the ability to do that in a reasonable way.

I should mention something else as well and I have to admit that it influenced my opinion a good bit. It is a very important aspect and maybe I should put up a separate post about this, because it is VERY surprising:

The deaths that we are currently experiencing is the only reliable number. We don’t know in a lot of cases if a death was caused by Covid-19 or not and for the dead person or his/her family it is not even relevant. But we know that these deaths are real! The ridiculous and brutal restriction to just 10 family member at a funeral, no matter how big the church or funeral venue is is also real and there is not the slightest justification for it. Thanks NPHET for one of exceptionally nonsensical rules!
But I discovered something else this week and I have not found ANYBODY writing or talking about it!!

There is a European Project that has the cute name “EuroMOMO”, but is not cute at all. EuroMOMO is a European mortality monitoring activity, so they cound the number of deaths that happen in Europe. And the goal of EuroMOMO is to detect and measure excess deaths related to seasonal influenza, pandemics and other public health threats.

So, the 24 participating countries report their number of deaths to EuroMOMO and EuroMOMO creates graphics and reports to show if and to what degree the deaths in a certain period of time are above or below the “normal” death rate. In normal years the deaths that are above the normal death rate are considered as influenza deaths if they happen between October and May. EuroMOMO has a lot of graphs and stats on their website, but the most relevant is the Z-scores by country and you should have a look at that here www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country

The results are shown on a time graph and the Z-score shows by how much the current number of deaths varies from the normal number of deaths. In Belgium, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and UK you see a significant peak. That shows that they are having significant more deaths than in normal years.

But now check Ireland! And you will be surprised to see that Ireland has LESS deaths in this Covid-19 period than it would be normal this time of the year. LESS!!!

I have no idea why that is, maybe it is because there are less other hospital operations. Maybe because there are less accidents because people stay at home. Maybe the fact that people avoid going to hospital if they have some other issues, keeps them alive longer? I have no clue! It also doesn’t mean – and I repeat that on purpose again – that Covid-19 is not happening or that it is harmless or that it is just like a normal flu. NO! That is all nonsense! And the numbers in other countries clearly show that. But if our excess mortality at the moment is lower than normal, then maybe the 1014 deaths (as of yesterday) are at least in Ireland, just normality. And if that is the case then we have to continue keeping the virus under control by keeping a physical distance, but we have to wonder if the current lockdown is justified in its current form!

Soooo, can we trust the people in charge? What do you think?

Corona Virus, Economy, Elections, Health System, Politics, Taoiseach, , , , , , , , , , ,

The Corona Files: We did go too far!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
1 Comment
The Corona Files: We did go too far!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a poem that is called “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and when I went to school, we had to learn it. I did exceptionally badly that day and got the worst mark on reciting the poem that I ever got in my whole school “career”. So it is a poem that I will never completely forget. One of the lines is “Die Geister die ich rief, werd ich nicht mehr los.” and that translates to “The spirits that I called, I can’t get rid of anymore.”

We are clearly still in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis (some think we are only at the beginning of it!), but a lot has happened and I am genuinely and deeply concerned about the long term effects that policy decisions had already and will have on our behaviour to each other.

The “We are all in it together!” is long forgotten and fear and panic has replaced the we-will-fight-through-this attitude from before.

I came across a whole range of scenarios that worry me! Here are just a few examples:

1) The Police State

Over the Easter weekend when the much stricter restrictions where in place a friend of mine and his partner went on a food shopping trip for his and her parents who are elderly and are cocooning. Because they live a little bit apart at the outskirts of Dublin, they had to travel a bit to shops and then to deliver the food. On their way, they were stopped at SIX garda checkpoints and they were never able to deliver the food. On one of the checkpoints an ill informed garda gave them nearly the full “E-E-E-E” treatment that was used as garda strategy that weekend. The four Es is Engagement / Explain / Encourage / Enforcement. (www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0409/1129677-what-to-expect-from-gardai-during-covid-19-restrictions/)

They were told that they are NOT allowed to drive to their parents to bring them food despite the fact that “caring for the elderly” was clearly classed as ESSENTIAL during the Covid-19 crisis. They were also threatened with legal action if they don’t turn around. Nonsensically, the garda told them that instead they should bring all their shopping to the next garda station so that the food would be delivered by gardai to their parents. (There was no answer on how to deal with frozen food.)
Maybe this was just ONE garda on a power trip or an extremely badly briefed garda? But at another one of the six checkpoints, they were berated by a garda because two people (who live together!!!) were in the same car. :-O There is no rule or law in Ireland that disallows that.
By the way: They had to give up and turn around to avoid being prosecuted or arrested…and the parents didn’t get the food for Easter!

2) Inexcusable Misinformation

A situation that was not related to Covid-19 forced me to be in A&E in a Dublin hospital 2 weeks ago. I was there with my partner and as it is normal and natural during the waiting period and between examinations we sat next to each other and talked about what happened. The shift of the office based A&E staff had changed and the new admin at the reception had taken over. 10 minutes later he spotted us and came running out from behind his glass screen, shouting at me for not keeping a social distance. I explained to him that this was my partner who I live with. But that didn’t stop him! Instead he got even more excited and told me that this does not matter in the slightest. We are in a hospital and therefore have to keep a distance of 2m from each other.
He either didn’t understand the rules OR he was taught nonsensical rules and didn’t question them.

3) Blinding Fear

Someone I am “friends” with on Facebook wrote in a Facebook conversation
during the week:

“If people meet and don’t keep the distance at the moment, they could infect others. The infected people could die. So meeting others is akin to murder!”

I am lost for words in this case. How can any sane and sensible person draw that conclusion?? The person who wrote that clearly lost all reason and I can only conclude that this is caused by a blinding fear.

4) Attacking the people who help!

Luckily we have not reached the lowest of lows in Ireland: In the UK, Health Care workers are being attacked and abused for being “virus spreaders”. Tires of ambulances are slashed and cars of hospital employees are damaged. The ITV news on 15 April had this report:

How can it come to this? My guess is: Irrational fear, stirred by sensational media reports. This is shocking stuff!

5) No Way Out

At some point in the not toooo distant future, we will have to go back to offices again and kids will have to go to schools. But the virus will not be gone! So how will we deal with that?
In Denmark, where they are a little faster with lifting restrictions and thought about letting young children return to school first, rapidly 18,000 parents declared that they will refuse letting their kids go back to school.

How will we deal with a loosening of the restrictions? Will we also refuse to go to work? Let kids go to school? If a vaccine is another 12-18 months away, will some of us lock themselves in at home and refuse to go to work until then? How will YOU react when you have to go back to work? Enter a room again with other people inside?

In my opinion, we have definitely overdone it! We have over-egged the pudding!! And it is all based on fear that has been whipped up by our authorities, lead by the government and advised by medical officers and epidemiologists.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the lockdown was the right thing to do, BUT what did the Taoiseach do to “incentivise” the country? He said on 09 March that in Ireland 85,000 people could die from the Coronavirus. (www.independent.ie/world-news/coronavirus/up-to-85000-irish-people-could-die-from-coronavirus-in-worst-case-scenario-taoiseach-indicates-as-three-more-diagnosed-39029363.html) This was not wrong information, but it was information that was used to get us worried so that we would adhere to the restrictions.

Later on, language was used that suggested to us that our lives were in serious and immediate danger. All measures were “to save lives”. “Stay home stay safe!!” This is also not wrong, but we can’t be surprised that then many look at the other people on the same footpath as a threat to their life. Or when leaving your home to go back to work is seen as risking ones life.

And now you see where “The spirits that I called, I can’t get rid of anymore.” becomes relevant! We over did it! We became so fearful that the care that people showed for each other in the beginning turned into people being prepared to report their neighbours for the smallest Covid-19 rule infringement.

It is a little early to think about things going back to “normality”, but what type of society do we want when we are going back to a sort of normality? If you have certain preferences, don’t let others pound fears and believes in you that are counterproductive!

Assess for yourself and judge what makes sense and what doesn’t. Then check with people that you trust if your assessment is reasonably and logical. Be prepared to learn and to speak up if necessary!

Oh and never ever forget that MOST others don’t do the (questionable) things they do to hurt or harm you, but because they don’t know better. Always be compassionate!

Corona Virus, Health System, Irish, Media, Overexaggerations, Politics, Taoiseach, , , , , , ,
 
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