The Irish Examiner View: Policy failure highlighted in a new way

Anyone who works, or at least until recently worked, in an office, a factory or a school setting, others too, will be familiar with fire drills. These are intended to ensure that in the event of a fire chaos and panic might be averted and that buildings would be evacuated safely. The hope must be that the need to test these preparations remains remote but some of us, almost inevitably, will someday face that challenge.

It may be glib to compare the impact of coronavirus to an everyday fire drill but it may be worthwhile especially as the pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities that would not exist in an ideal world. We do not, and we never will, live in an ideal world but that should not deter us from learning obvious lessons around what eventually happens when reality is, for whatever reasons, consistently denied. That some of these these lessons might be applied without reinventing the wheel or breaking the bank adds the weight of commonsense to that argument.