Irish Examiner view: Proportionality vital in battles against Covid-19

The pandemic and our reactions to it have not always been proportional. Some responses have been too relaxed, others may have been heavy-handed

Shoppers wearing face masks on Careys Lane, Cork.  The most basic pragmatism suggests that wearing a mask in public is a sensible, neutral thing to do.

'Proportionality' is one of those helpful words with weighted, subjective meaning. The more critical it is in one situation or another, the more critical that situation usually is. That ambiguity, that how-long-is-a-lockdown flexibility, might not appeal to the more pedantic lexicographers but in today's ever-changing circumstances the latitude offered by the word is both necessary and, in a way constraining. 

Anger is the enemy of proportionality — as some of the furies directed at those who refuse to wear a mask in public places show. The anger of those who refuse to wear a mask in a public setting when challenged about their misjudged, selfish recklessness is the other side of the very same coin.