Irish Examiner view: Let’s upscale climate war to C19 pace

Pandemic offers huge lesson

The International Energy Agency yesterday warned that carbon dioxide emissions are forecast to jump this year by the second-biggest annual rise in history. Picture: PA Wire

There is a growing, probably justified sense that things have taken a turn for the better, that we have found ways to counter, or at least steer, the pandemic. That optimism seems plausible, science seems to have found a key to the future, or many keys if some of the scores of vaccines in development prove worthwhile. Managing that optimism, even though we all long to — and need to — kick the traces, is just the latest challenge imposed by the wretched coronavirus.

The old trap of counting chickens before they hatch is as seductive but as dangerous as ever. Any hope that we might kick the traces and embrace a new-old normal before the Whit weekend, only six weeks hence, may have been threatened by yesterday’s announcement that two Dundalk nursing home staff, fully vaccinated since February, tested positive. People can test positive for Covid-19 despite being fully inoculated, we know this, but the vaccines prevent death and serious illness and neither of the staff has displayed any symptoms. Though we knew cases like this one would emerge, it is nevertheless unnerving.