Government must move faster or else country will be up the creek
Inside Track with John McIntyre
It’s getting kind of embarrassing. Government and HSE media adverts still instructing people to stay indoors and not to travel beyond 5k from their homes. This advice, though well intended, is seriously out-of-date as most of the country’s population have made up their own minds on which of the regulations introduced to tackle Covid-19 are still worth following.
Instead of our authorities leading the nation, they have instead fallen behind the curve. Way too much caution; way too much qualification of any good news; and unfair scaremongering about the future impact of a potential second wave of the coronavirus. The Irish people deserve more respect and trust given their necessary compliance in the first two months of the national health emergency.
It’s not as though large tracts of the population are deliberately ignoring the counsel of medical advisers, rather they are becoming less risk adverse due to a combination of common sense and the necessity to get some form of normality back into their lives. For the past week, there have been growing calls from various strands of business, sporting and community groups for the Government to let off the handbrake a bit quicker in relaxing some of the restrictions.
People are getting tired of queuing to spend their own money and the vast majority are baffled why the 2m social distancing rule has not already been dispensed with given the savage toll it’s continuing to have on the economy. Most people have just weighed up the risks and believe it’s past time to move on.
We all have friends with underlying health problems, and others recovering from chemotherapy or radiotherapy, nursing genuine concerns about opening up the country again too quickly, but if we don’t, the implications will be disastrous for our economy and society in general. There is a balancing act, especially as the virus has been supressed in the community.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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