Irish Examiner View: Our cautious steps back to freedom

If at times in the past three months ministers and their medical advisers have given the appearance of making up their Covid -19 plans — with its road map phases — as they go along, it is almost certainly because that is exactly what they have been doing. There is no blame or shame in this; contrary to the impression some politicians are tempted to put across, they are merely human, not Delphic oracles. Like the rest of us, they and their epidemiology modellers are up against a virus of which even now little is known for sure other than that it is an unpitying killer and that it remains among us.

The number of confirmed cases worldwide stands at more than 6.5m with almost 400,000 deaths.