Letter to the Editor: Questions need to be asked about impact of Cheltenham
One of the things I can do during this lockdown is write to you daily to ask at least one question relating to the current pandemic.
Questions which cannot be answered until the pandemic is history but beg to be asked right now anyway.
But first let me suggest a term that might become all too familiar in the near future: DPMP — deaths per million population, i.e., the bottom line in how Covid-19 affects individual countries.
Right now for Covid-19, the DPMP is just under 46 here in the Republic of Ireland, while in the UK it is 85 and in Germany just over 22.
Anybody curious about more detailed statistics for this country should go Wikipedia.org and search for ‘coronavirus pandemic Republic of Ireland’.
- Shop for essential food and household goods;
- Attend medical appointments, collect medicine or other health products;
- Care for children, older people or other vulnerable people - this excludes social family visits;
- Exercise outdoors - within 2kms of your home and only with members of your own household, keeping 2 metres distance between you and other people
- Travel to work if you provide an essential service - be sure to practice physical distancing
Somebody has made it their business to keep the statistics and graphs there right up to date to the extent that, just after the latest daily death and cases counts are announced at about 6pm, the graphs immediately but temporarily disappear from that webpage while they are updated.
Thanks to whoever is maintaining those graphs and tables.
So to today’s currently unanswerable question: Of all those people resident in Ireland who caught Covid-19, how many of them attended the Cheltenham Festival in March?
That was one of the last public events on these islands before the current lockdown and from here it’s occurrence seems both impossible and incredible.
No doubt that is being wise after the event but when the worldwide post-mortem on the pandemic eventually happens it will, apart from anything else, be the biggest festival EVER of being wise after the event (which at least is better than never being ‘wise’ at all ).
![<p>'Despite the fact that the Irish Science Teachers’ Association, the ASTI and the Irish Universities Association representatives on the NCCA Biology, Chemistry, and Physics have publicly dissociated from the flawed model [in the senior cycle curriculum plan], all of these concerns have been ignored by the Department of Education.' </p>](/cms_media/module_img/9742/4871127_9_augmentedSearch_PA-49006269_1_.jpg "<p>'Despite the fact that the Irish Science Teachers’ Association, the ASTI and the Irish Universities Association representatives on the NCCA Biology, Chemistry, and Physics have publicly dissociated from the flawed model [in the senior cycle curriculum plan], all of these concerns have been ignored by the Department of Education.' </p>")
