Skip to main content

Trust in authorities during Covid times

I have to admit that when it comes to authorities (governments, “experts”, “expert” groups, WHO and official groups with an agenda) I am extremely suspicious regarding their credibility and reliability and I question nearly everything.

Many do the best they can, but is the best they can maybe very biased information? We saw that the WHO gave totally wrong advice right from the beginning for the wrong reasons. We were told that masks are not needed and won’t help, because they were concerned that any other information would “hoover up” all the masks and then nothing would be left for healthcarers. Then the WHO told us that spread of the virus through aerosols is not an issue, now we know it is the MAIN issue.

So if you can’t trust the World Health Organisation, then you can’t trust anyone.

But does that really apply to local governments? Even to ours? Yes! And you sometimes just have to find one or two contradictions to find out that they have NO clue about what they are telling us.
In this case it is the “mandatory quarantine list”. On Friday 13 more Central and South American countries were added to that list (www.thejournal.ie/mandatory-quarantine-countries-5367064-Feb2021/) and you might be surprised that with the odd exception of Austria the countries on the list are all from outside the EU. As if EU countries have no virus problem!? Sure they do! But it is seriously complex to forbid EU citizens to travel within the EU, so we will quickly add the non-EU countries and give the EU countries a different treatment.

When you look through the list further and ponder over every country, you will find Mauritius on it! Mauritius is a small with just a fourth of the population of Ireland. It is an island about 2000km away from Africa. From 1810 until 1968 it was occupied by the Brits and that will be relevant in a moment.
Mauritius has NO virus problem! The total cases since the beginning was 610 and the total deaths was 10. Cases per 1 mio population is 479, whereby in Ireland we have 43,879 cases per 1 mio population. So WHY is Mauritius on that list? There are not even direct flights from there to Ireland.

Well, on 21 Dec 2020 Mauritius has decided to ban people from the UK to enter their country (travelbans.org/africa/mauritius/). A decision that made a lot of sense, considering the situation in the UK. As a payback, the British “if you step on my toes, I will step on yours”-government has banned people from Mauritius to enter the UK from 09 Jan 2021.

And why does Ireland ban people from Mauritius, because our great government seemingly just copied the British list unchecked. FAIL!

It is a tiny, close to irrelevant issue, but if you can’t trust on the super simple things, can you trust on the big things??

Covid-19 Fines – Have they lost it?

Covid-19 Fines – Have they lost it?

For the speedy resolution of wars, insurgency and other conflicts, the concept of “Winning Hearts and Minds” is used in modern times. It means that one side is trying to win the conflict not by the use of superior force, but by making emotional or intellectual appeals to convince supporters of the other side.

The idea behind it is that if you convince the other side of the sense of your actions, then you need to fight less and you will ultimately be MUCH more effective, efficient AND there will be less victims.

Our (previous) government made a weak attempt in using this strategy in early days. We were told that laws can’t be enacted to prevent people from breaking the lockdown and Simon Harris kept telling us that we should just hold together for one more push before things would get better.

The current  government is clearly taking a different route. Laws are suddenly possible and they are in place and are used a LOT. This week the RTE News reported that the crazy amount of 4500 people have been fined for breaching Covid-19 regulations. www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2021/0205/1195336-garda-restrictions-fines/

The total amount of serious crimes that lead to a charge or summons in 2019 was just measly 550 and out of more than 16,000 burglaries that happened, it seems that just 13 were punished appropriately, based on Central Statistics Office details. www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-rcd/recordedcrimedetection2019/crimesleadingtochargeorsummons/

I really hope that I am misinterpreting the numbers and that someone can tell me that I made a big mistake, but if not, then this means that breaking the (random) 5km movement restriction is pursued with significantly more vigor than burglaries. :-O
I think we can clearly say that the government has lost the support from the people. Maybe a serious “Winning Hears and Minds” approach would have us in a different place?

 
Malcare WordPress Security