In this pandemic.

Now we are in the midst of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus outbreak in Ireland, and the world is gripped by the pandemic. It is going to get worse here, before, hopefully, it slowly gets better. Things will never be the same - an overused phrase but it does feel like this pandemic has changed the world profoundly in a short space of time. I was following it intensely since 9th January when I first heard about an outbreak of unusual pneumonia in China. I was fearful of where that could lead, and early on thought there could be 2-3000 deaths, mainly in China. I didn't speculate then about the potential global death toll, which depended so much on whether it could be contained. No-one predicted then the true horrors of what would happen, what is continuing to happen, now when we are still weeks away from the possible peak of cases and deaths. When I last wrote here on 29th February the first case had just been confirmed in Ireland that day, and significant attention was beginning to be given to the disease in Ireland. I feel the country's political and health leadership have actually done most of the right things and taken most of the necessary actions at the right time, earlier than many other countries. But as the deaths mount up each day now, there is a great deal of grief and loss ahead of us here in Ireland. As much of the rest of the world has already experienced, and as Italy and Spain are experiencing at horrifying, incomprehensible levels. After the thousands of deaths and suffering in China, especially in Wuhan and Hubei province, and all the restrictions that country and its people heroically endured to try and bring the disease under control, still it seemed that many European countries did not heed the warning, did not take it seriously or do what was needed. Most of all the leadership and health experts did not communicate with the people properly, so that they were on board and willingly compliant with the necessary restrictions, so when those essential constraints were introduced, they were ineffective, even counter-productive. In Ireland, largely, it seems like most people are engaged, they understand the vital importance of social distancing, testing and contact tracing, and they are mainly doing what needs to be done, without aggressive enforcement. That is the only way it can work, the only way we can save each other. Hopefully now we can save lives, save more people here, protect the vulnerable, allow the health system to take care of everyone that needs it, not have to make haunting choices about who gets the potentially life-saving care and who does not. The grief, the losses in Italy and Spain at the moment, 600 and 800 and more people dying in a single day, sometimes most of those deaths happening in one small area or even a single hospital, this level and speed of loss will have devastating, multi-generational effects on the families, societies and cultures of those areas. It is affecting entire countries, rippling out across Europe, and the world, and will for a long time. But because we are still in this fight, still in this maelstrom of apocalyptic horror, and the end is not yet in sight, because there is still so much to do to stop this getting even worse, there isn't the time and space and capacity for grief, for the mourning that will need to come. That will be in the future.

Many people and societies have experienced, and continue to experience, horror and death on a mass scale, from sources that are more preventable, and more treatable, than COVID-19. We do not report in the same way on the thousands of avoidable deaths every day from malnutrition, heart disease, stroke, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, lung cancer, diabetes or road injuries, or those from malaria, AIDS, or birth complications. This is not to say that these are more important, or that we shouldn't be focusing particularly at the moment on COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. Just that the suffering and deaths from these other causes could be vastly reduced and even stopped. We already have proven prevention strategies, vaccines and treatments for them, and as a world we are choosing not to do that. Like these long-established health problems, there are many injustices in how this new disease is being responded to, and deep-set injustices in how global health, economic and social systems operate that have allowed it to spread and worsen at this cataclysmic rate. The light in the darkness is that this terrible experience has made many, many people see that this way of running the world is not right, and that it needs to change. What gives me hope is that COVID-19 and the world's unprecedented response to it shows what we can do, when we act together in the interests of the most vulnerable and of all of humanity. That we can do better, much much better. And we are living that better world, amidst this awful experience, right now. Things that were deemed impossible even a month ago are now being changed by the very same political and economic 'leaders' who dismissed them. In Ireland, more doctors and nurses have been hired, health systems are being radically reconfigured, and private hospitals have been made public. No-one is on trolleys which were occupied by record numbers of people waiting for treatment in every hospital just a few weeks ago. A rent freeze has been put in place and evictions have been banned. Unemployment benefits have been rapidly issued for the thousands who have been laid off, and these and other social payments have been increased. Thousands of people have signed up to help in the government's appeal to be 'on call for Ireland' and hundreds of thousands more are informally helping one another and the vulnerable in their localities, every day. Carbon emissions globally have dropped. People have radically changed their lives to stay at home, work from home, school children at home, socialise while physically distant, and much more. People have come together, by staying apart, to save lives. And by doing this, by actually experiencing this kind of radical change in such a short time frame and on a national and global scale, we all see and know and live what can be done. Amid the sadness we have not yet had time to process and the still falling ruins of the dysfunctional world we had been living in, we are creating a better world we might want. Another world is not just possible. A better world is here and now. Even as the world is also worse, even among the deaths, and loss, and suffering, caused by this new disease and every old one. We are fighting for our lives, and for that better world. And in this painful moment I believe we can win.