Irish Examiner view: Any further rise of Covid cases is down to us

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly with Brigadier General Brendan McGuinness, Commander of the Defence Forces Covid-19 Joint Taskforce, and Oonagh Buckley, Deputy Secretary General, Department of Justice, at a technical briefing on mandatory hotel quarantine. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

At moments of crisis, a solution just beyond reach can have a particular allure.

The “if only we could...” argument gathers an undue significance and can seem more important than it is. 

Such a solution often promises more than it delivers. It might be wise to temper expectations around mandatory hotel quarantine with that likelihood.

In an ideal world, it would have been helpful to have hermetically sealed this island a year ago, but that, for myriad reasons of varying value, was not, and is not, possible.

Nevertheless, the Department of Health has confirmed that hotel quarantine will cost travellers nearly €1,900 each for a 12-night stay package. 

This confirms that the measure is designed to dissuade rather than to facilitate and may have an impact in sectors, particularly food, built on a minimum-wage model.

That, however, may not be its real challenge. While our airports and seaports were more or less porous, that flow of travellers offered an excuse, even if unjustified, for our persistently high Covid-19 rates.

That option has been largely cut off now, so the spread of the pandemic is largely a domestic affair.

We are now, to a greater degree than before, masters of our own destiny.

If infection rates continue to climb, and unless some new factor presents itself, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

But in our hearts of hearts, we knew that, so why are infection rates still so threatening? Exactly.