The Irish Examiner View: It’s too early to relax most restrictions

There may be an opportunity for a certain type of person to sit up in their easy chair to harrumph a kind of historical vindication in the fact that, just as we marked the 104th anniversary of one of our last rejections of London's authority, Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff have done the same. Though executions are not immediately anticipated the stakes may be even higher than they were in 1916. Our man at ease in his chair may buck at that suggestion but the Spanish Flu pandemic which began its scything not so very long after after the Easter Rising offers a sobering context.

That context is made all the more unavoidable as today's pandemic seems resurgent in the Chinese city of Shulan near the Russian and North Korean borders. It is made even more so as the second wave of Spanish flu was far more lethal than the first. The Shulan cases came a week after China designated all regions low or medium risk. On Sunday the country reported 17 new cases, its second day of a double-digit rise and its highest number in nearly two weeks.