Paul Hosford: We don't expect a perfect Covid plan — just a coherent one

An American Airlines plane landing at Dublin Airport. From tomorrow, the US will be added to the mandatory hotel quarantine list. Picture: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ie

Are you going anywhere sunny this summer?

It's unlikely many of us will have a positive answer to that question, at least if our Easter weather is anything to go by. It is likely that we face what acting chief medical officer Ronan Glynn told the Oireachtas Health Committee would be another summer on this island.

Personally, I had planned a trip to Wallis and Futuna Island, but the requirement for two weeks of hotel quarantine made a trip to an island chain 3,500km from Australia completely infeasible.

Facetiousness aside, the addition of Wallis and Futuna — five deaths, 446 cases since January 2020 — at a time when the Government was resisting calls to add the likes of the US — 557,000 deaths and 31m cases — is a microcosm of why a quarantine system that was not wanted by those who run it is mired in the least auspicious of starts.

The latest incident sees the system's rooms... full. The Department of Health and operator Tifco announced on Tuesday evening that bookings were paused for the weekend, with no indication of just what happens if a person shows up in Ireland without a booking and the rooms are unavailable. Presumably, the person is just kept in Dublin Airport in some 2021 remake of the Tom Hanks film The Terminal, only with €9 pints.

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly says that the system will be scaled up, from the 650 beds currently available to another 300 on Monday and a further 400 the week after.

Scaling up

While some in the Government have argued that the system is a deterrent to travel full stop, a doubling of its size within two months doesn't exactly support that. This scaling up has been forced on the very first occasion that countries with meaningful levels of travel to and from Ireland have been added to the list. With respect to Eswatini, which was added in the first wave.

The pausing of bookings comes nearly a week after the announcement of the addition of 16 countries, including the US and several EU countries, to the 59 already in the system. We were told that the delay in adding these countries was linked to concerns over capacity and staff training, but it has now been 15 days since the Expert Travel Group made its recommendations to Mr Donnelly.

All the while, weary Dubs look at their city centre which has had its cultural heart ripped out and laugh at the idea that there are not enough hotel rooms.

As with many occasions in Ireland's response to this pandemic, we are forced to look back to March 13, 2020, and the words of the WHO's Mike Ryan.

“Be fast, have no regrets. You must be the first mover. The virus will always get you if you don’t move quickly,” said Dr Ryan.

“If you need to be right before you move, you will never win. Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to emergency management.

“Speed trumps perfection."

In Ireland, of course, we have seen neither. We have created an imperfect system at a speed usually reserved for ships stuck in the Suez Canal. With Nphet first calling for a system to apply to all inbound passengers in May last year, the Government was dragged kicking and screaming into the current quagmire where legal cases are being taken and won, people are boarding planes without having booked, and now there are too many people arriving to cope.

And that is not to say that this system should have been rushed into. It is incredibly complex and detaining someone who has committed no crime deserves due consideration. 

The Government says the test that the system must pass is proportionality. The trade-off is that the greater good — namely avoiding the spread of variants of the disease — is protected by forcing some people to quarantine. But the cases of fully vaccinated people are not proportional. 

If we are telling Irish people they can meet when fully vaccinated indoors with no masks, how can we say that people vaccinated abroad are not allowed to spend their two weeks at home?

Which is the elephant in the room here. Hotel quarantine would not be necessary if Ireland's softer option — quarantine at home — had been a success. It is lost in the debate — all arrivals into Ireland should quarantine for two weeks. 

But when 164,000 people arrived at Ireland's ports of entry in December, that system was ineffective, with the end result a foregone conclusion. 

Hotel quarantine is only seen as necessary because the resources and manpower needed to make home quarantine work simply do not exist. 

We cannot go door-to-door asking if people are home — nor should we. 

But we can ask those coming from countries that are identified as a danger to our public health to take extra precautions.

There is no silver bullet to getting us out of the nightmare that has been the last 13 months. There simply isn't and anyone who tells you that there is must be disregarded immediately.

Mandatory hotel quarantine is not the panacea some would sell it as. But it is also important that we bring some definition to what will "work". 

In Ireland, we have equated virus control or suppression measures that don't return life to February 2020 as failures. But that dream is over. The post-Covid world will be different for some time and getting there will require a suite of measures and realignment of certain values or priorities.

And, while the public will accept a measure that plays a part but doesn't eradicate the virus, it also has a right to expect that those measures which are being adopted are being pursued with the same level of dedication which most of us are showing to combating Covid.

Half measure

Instead, mandatory hotel quarantine has been a toe in the water, a half measure if even.

Making people who live or are from here pay to be quarantined against their will is not, in any true sense, fair. But none of this is. Missing family events. Staying within 5km of home. Ten at a funeral. 4,800 people dead. They are all not fair.

Nobody expects perfection. There will be mistakes and bumps in rollouts, but the least the public — which has been through 13 months of this — expects is that the State's own measures will be carried out with its whole heart.