Joyce Fegan: The curveball of Delta that we just didn't need

After enduring 16 months of restrictions, hardship, loss, and grief, we’d been turning a corner and looking forward — and then the door was abruptly closed

Chief Medical Officer, Dr Tony Holohan during at a public health briefing earlier this week. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins

I could distract myself by listening to the new BBC Sounds documentary about freeing Britney Spears. I could feel outrage that a grown woman has no control over her life — financial, reproductive, or otherwise — a life that was pilloried for our entertainment. 

I say “distract”, because in listening to the story of the singer’s conservatorship, there is nothing that I can do to change her situation.

I could also feel outrage how a man convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman could be released from prison over a procedural issue. 

Bill Cosby had his 2018 conviction overturned in Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court this week, because a previous district attorney had promised in 2005 that he would not be charged.

A Britney Spears supporter waves a "Free Britney" flag outside a court hearing concerning the pop singer's conservatorship. Picture: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

More than 50 other women have accused him of sexual assault.

Cosby emerged jubilant this week outside his home, a female handler smiling on, with his arm high in the air, his fingers making the ‘V for victory’ symbol. 

Whose victory? It’s not a victory for women everywhere, who are already reluctant to report alleged sexual crimes.

The Spears and Cosby cases, both in the US, have made huge headlines this week. 

One man walks free. One woman, an artist, entertainer, remains under the control of others. They both illustrate major issues. One, how sexual-assault accusers are treated by a justice system, and, two, how a woman’s body can be controlled by law.

In a non-pandemic time, these would be the news stories of the week. Campaigning would follow outrage and then, possibly, some social and legal change would occur, as we saw in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein revelations with the galvanising of the MeToo movement.

But this isn’t a normal time.

And on Irish shores this week, as many small-business owners prepared to finally open the shutters to their gyms, and to their pubs and cafes for indoor dining, different news came.

You know the way it’s said that both babies and elderly people can ‘rally’, in that they’ll be very sick one minute and then bounce back?

It’s like we have all been rallying for some time now, one lockdown after another: A strict first six months of 2021, waiting for vaccine delivery, then delays to the rollout, then a slow rollout, to the rollout finally finding its feet. 

We were at the finish line: Just about. We had booked staycations, couldn’t wait to dine out, and get back to that gym class. Life as we had once known it, for ordinary people, and for small-business owners, of whom there are hundreds of thousands in this domestic economy, was about to finally return.

New surge

Then, Delta hit. The new variant of the coronavirus is driving a “significant” new Covid-19 surge, Dr Tony Holohan warned.

The highly transmissible variant is suspected to now account for nearly 70% of new cases in the State, the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) said.

And with that, it was recommended that the reopening of indoor dining, of pubs, and of things such as indoor gyms and studios, was to be delayed.

We have just endured 16 months of restrictions, hardship, challenges, death, loss, and grief, we’d been turning a corner and looking forward to the future, and then the door was abruptly closed.

There were rants on radio and on social media, with scientists under attack from those far less in the know. 

There were comparisons with what is happening in Europe. 

There were despondent business owners who had put in one final rally, in the hope that their loyal customers would indeed return, only to find out that their hope of a livelihood was premature.

There was social discord as our heads spun, with Taoiseach Micheál Martin stating, on the Dáil record: “We don’t want to divide society”, as he defended the decision to pause the reopening of indoor hospitality.

Then, there were those who were reminding us, as a reason to forge ahead with the reopening of indoor dining, of the huge debt that must be repaid as a result of the last 16 months.

And there was the politics of it all, too: Vaccine certificates and antigen testing were tabled as ways to forge ahead with indoor dining. 

It all felt like scrambling. It felt like chaos, with politicians, who need to mind their votes, turning on scientists, who do not need to worry about popularity to stay in their job; they just worry about facts.

Leadership

Watching on from our homes, be it on Prime Time or in headlines glimpsed on phone screens, leadership and solutions felt far away.

And then news broke yesterday that 18- to 34-year-olds can opt in early for the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines. From this Monday, that age group can register for the J&J vaccine with pharmacies. And from Monday, July 12, they can opt in for J&J and AZ jabs through the normal HSE portal.

All this is being done to speed up the vaccine rollout. 750 pharmacies are participating, but there are only 53,000 J&J vaccines at pharmacies nationally, with an additional 70,000 doses available at short notice, “if needed”.

Escapism at its best.

Is it any wonder that a television show of chiselled people wearing bikinis and dark, fake tan, at a villa in Spain, is such a hit?

When all seems lost, including concrete leadership, amidst so much chaos after an extremely long crisis, escapism seems like a good plan.

But then there is that bill to pay, the hope that the economy will bounce back, that jobs can be salvaged and livelihoods and public services maintained and increased. In the work of recovery ahead, let’s hope that there will not be this much chaos, this much discord.

The Delta variant might have been a surprise, and the chaos somewhat understandable, but the fact that we have a major recovery to undertake is well forecast.

In that recovery, there is so much possibility for positive change, a chance to avoid austerity this time around, and to invest in things like a public model of childcare and climate justice, where sustainable jobs can be created and lives improved.

It’ll take leadership.