Alison O’Connor: Easy to blame politicians but the public abandoned common sense

In truth there were always going to be problems with Christmas when faced with a population sick and tired of the restrictions endured in a pandemic. Picture: Denis Minihane

If I had a euro for every daft spreading-Covid-over-Christmas story that has pinged into my WhasApp in recent days I could buy myself my own vaccine. 

The mood I’m in it’s gives me some pleasure to mull over all the detail and properly exercise my outrage — from the safety of my own home, obviously.

Where to begin? The pub with the outbreak involving 70 people after a party on New Year’s Eve. Or the pub with an outbreak of over 40 cases, sourced from someone who got off a plane from London and headed for the local. That would be a local in a village that opened its doors, against the rules, on Christmas Eve. 

Or similarly where another London returnee, who got a negative Covid test, but ignored advice to keep isolating, visited all and sundry and now half the parish is infected.

How about the girl who was awaiting the results of a test but went along to Christmas Day mass where she partook in singing those lovely seasonal hymns. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work this one out either. 

Or the young lad who couldn’t do the 12 pubs of Christmas (ah those wet pubs, if only they’d opened up) so he visited 12 friends at home instead. Yes, you can guess the rest. 

Or the man who went for dinner in a restaurant who sat at a table of six, with six more friends at the next table. Yup. In-laws, outlaws — it subsequently spread like wildfire through his and his wife’s family.

There was the one from the hospital nurse who told of a Covid patient who reported 47 contacts on Christmas Day. 

Not to forget about the GP who apparently had a Christmas party for over 50 people. He surely continued his host duties by offering guests Covid tests in the days afterwards?

Let us not exclude the GAA club where there was a lock-in which resulted in a brace of cases and was subsequently linked to a local supermarket staff outbreak. 

I’m not sure how many of those stories are true, some absolutely are, and most are extremely well-sourced. Given our virus levels some of them, or variations of them, must be true.

As I type this a friend who lives relatively nearby, next to a Dublin Church, sends a message about a funeral she can see out her window. There were around 50 people in the churchyard around the hearse, a number without masks.

We won’t even get started on the wakes that have happened all over the country and what went on there.

Remember that road traffic safety ad on the telly where we were told it was the guy without the seatbelt that did the damage in a particular crash? Well, to adapt that scenario it would appear thousands of people threw off the seatbelt and abandoned caution causing the multiple Covid pile-ups in almost every corner of the country.

You could begin by pointing towards Government guidance on opening back up in December, but the reality is so many simply abandoned common sense. People decided Christmas traditions could not be abandoned, even though we are in the middle of a pandemic. 

As December progressed the writing on the wall got bigger and bigger but too many people simply turned away; caught up in some sort of Covid-denial magical thinking. Even allowing for how fed up we all are after a year of this damn pandemic the exceptionalism was extraordinary.

Red alert on some mega virtue signalling here. There were some of us who were incredibly careful over Christmas. No one is perfect, but at the end of it all there is comfort in looking back and thinking you did your best. 

In fact, there were a number of times in the run-up to the festive season where you might have felt a little foolish, even over-reactive, given how much else was going on socially.

It is important to add here that it can be all too easy to cast judgement when you are speaking from the comfort of a nuclear family unit and your own comfortable home.

So it is necessary, and humane, to factor in the many vulnerable people who live alone, or who are in difficult living situations, and simply had to seek some Christmas solace. But these were in the tiny minority of the social blow-outs responsible for the restaurant/bar/multi-family meet-up outbreaks.

One small plus here is that we will be saved the future outrage over the apparent lack of proof surrounding the spread of the virus in hospitality settings. In fact, our current affairs programmes have had to do a serious regroup since the start of January. 

There is a big hole in their guest lists that used to be filled by Covid hawks who spent the final weeks of 2020 throwing shade on the Covid doves who urged caution. “Where’s the proof?” they would ask about Covid spreading in a social setting. Well, they have their proof now.

We’ve learned this week that the new, more easily transmitted, strain from the UK is responsible for around 25% of our infection rate, although this remains an estimate.

We knew there was every chance this was circulating — especially with the Government’s well-publicised travel ban from the UK from midnight on December 20th. It was all the more reason to be even more cautious. Without doubt it has contributed to some of our incredibly high levels of infection.

There are those who like to lay the blame on the Government for the hideous situation we are now in. Certainly the politicians hold responsibility. But they are also an easy target. 

In truth, there were always going to be problems with Christmas when faced with a population sick and tired of the restrictions endured in a pandemic. That situation though was not helped by the political attacks on Nphet in November. The fallout from those were the testosterone-fuelled stand-offs that subsequently went on, behind closed doors, between the two sides.

The controversy caused there — by so openly casting doubt on public health advice — simply added fuel to the “caution to the wind” attitude adopted by many citizens over Christmas.

Government research on human behaviour is said to show that when it comes to Covid there is no point in castigating Irish people for their behaviour; that it is much better to cajole them in order to bring them along. Perhaps there is something in that. 

But that doesn’t mean those of us who did behave responsibly can’t feel angry, especially if it means this latest lockdown, for instance, stops nursing home visits. For example, if the much-loved person in the nursing home is on the final stretch and they face that journey without any family or friends at their bedside. 

I can tell you now that tends to really raise the temper alright.