Sir, – Your editorial ("The Irish Times view on Covid-19 strategy: the tracing gap exposed", March 22nd) and the article by Fintan O'Toole ("We have chosen not to properly track the virus – the result is endless lockdown", Opinion & Analysis, March 23rd) correctly point to the failure to develop an effective contract tracing system and highlight how this failure means that the authorities appear not to know what is driving Covid case numbers.
Your editorial, however, goes on to claim that the situation is made “more galling” by lobby groups engaging in “special pleading” for the reopening of their sectors, specifically citing the Construction Industry Federation as a case in point.
Hundreds of businesses have been forced to close and tens of thousands of workers have been denied the right to work and earn a living as a result of lockdown measures recommended by Nphet. I would suggest that it must be galling to have their requests to be allowed to reopen and return to work dismissed as special pleading.
It must also be galling to be prevented from reopening and returning to work because the authorities’ failure to put an effective contract tracing system in place means they do not know which activities are high risk and which are low risk.
Galling also to hear a Nphet member describe contract tracing as just an “academic exercise”.
It is also worth bearing in mind that keeping the construction industry closed will worsen the housing crisis and leave more families homeless. The failure to establish an effective contract tracing scheme comes at a very high cost.
Many businesses may have been forced to close and their employees put out of work needlessly.
Equally galling is the Government’s ongoing failure to insist that Nphet and HSE put an effective contract tracing system in place, illustrating the extent to which it has been totally captured by those bodies. – Yours, etc,
PATRICK MASSEY,
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 14.
A chara, – Here we are a year into the pandemic. I have spent a year now being compliant with the rules.
Now I feel differently about it. I live alone and my work has disappeared due to Covid, so keeping to current rules is something I find burdensome, but acquiesce for my safety and the greater good. Now I feel that my sacrifice is not being responded to by Government with action to help us out of this isolation.
A year in, we do not have a robust, fit for purpose tracing system, and the quarantine system, which is just starting, seems to me idiosyncratic and patchy. It appears to me to be more about optics than efficiency.
I wonder why I should continue to keep the rules when I feel my efforts are not being matched by adequate Government action. – Yours, etc,
MARIE BREEN,
Drimnagh,
Dublin 12.