Usually a day of parades and parties nationwide, St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland was a muted affair.
A debate raged in Ireland for a week over whether the government should cancel the traditional St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. It did — finally — and with good reason. In a St. Patrick’s Day address to this small, island nation, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said the country is braced for at least 15,000 people to test positive for coronavirus by the end of the month.
“We’re asking people to come together as a nation by staying apart from each other,” he said. “This is the calm before the storm — before the surge,” he added. Varadkar paraphrased a quote by Winston Churchill, Britain’s Prime Minister during World War II: “Never will so many ask so much of so few.” (Churchill’s exact quote was: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”)
‘We’re asking people to come together as a nation by staying apart from each other.’
Health officials do not want the kind of sustained outbreak that happened in Italy to happen in this country of just over 4.8 million people. The Republic of Ireland shares a soft border with the British province of Northern Ireland, which has a population of over 1.9 million, where there is free movement of goods and people. Unlike schools south of the border, Northern Ireland has so far kept them open.
Varadkar also said he expects the numbers of those who test positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new virus SARS-CoV-2, to rise again beyond . He said it will likely rise further, and expects the current number of cases to rise by 30% every day over that period. He said the pandemic could last into the summer.
To put those figures in context, Italy — the worst affected country outside of China — currently reports that 31,506 people are confirmed to have the disease, while 2,503 have died from COVID-19. Following Italy’s lead, Irish Health Minister Simon Harris appealed to retired medical professionals (final-year medical students) to apply for jobs ahead of the expected influx of patients.
“We would expect that by the end of the month there would be maybe 15,000 people who would have tested positive for COVID-19. Most of those will not need treatment, but a proportion will need to be hospitalized and we need to make sure that it doesn’t happen at the same time,” Varadkar said at a news conference that again focused on the importance of social distancing to prevent contagion.
As of Tuesday evening, there were two confirmed coronavirus-related deaths in Ireland, local health authorities said. In Northern Ireland, there have been 11 deaths from COVID-19 and 62 confirmed cases. Worldwide, there were 196,640 confirmed cases and 7,894 deaths, according to data from the database of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
Last Saturday, people gathered in the Temple Bar district of central Dublin, crowded into bars, leading Varadkar to threaten to force pubs to close to keep crowds below 100 people. One video shows a crowd singing “Sweet Caroline” in a bar. All pubs in Ireland were subsequently closed on March 16. The government also advised people not to hold house parties for St. Patrick’s Day.
Tony Holohan, the government’s chief medical officer, said this week: “We’re not recommending a lockdown. It would be easy to recommend every airport, workplace, every part of society to close. That might reduce the spread of the virus, but it would be a disproportionate response.” Supermarkets and pharmacies are open. Many stores remain open.
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