THERE are growing calls for the Stormont Executive to reverse its decision to allow a large-scale relaxation of the Covid rules for five days over the Christmas holidays.
The plan is that from December 23 to December 27 people from three households will be able to meet to celebrate the season. But some doctors and Health Trust heads are warning that the family social gatherings could lead to up to ten times as many people in hospital in the New Year as there are now. And the scary part about that is that as of today our Health Service is already struggling to cope with what one Health Trust described as “unprecedented pressure”.
It appears that the politicians are content to leave the decision to Health Minister Robin Swann, who is currently considering the Christmas relaxation in the context of the worrying rise in Covid figures across the north. Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill said she would “support any proposals brought forward by the Health Minister to tackle the current situation”. The Sinn Féin chair of the Stormont Health Committee, Colum Gildernew, was singing from the same carol sheet in a radio interview.
But leaving it to Minister Swann is not good enough. The former UUP leader has struggled manfully to cope with the pandemic and he has proved himself to be a reasonable and thoughtful politician, even though the mind-boggling demands of the job have inevitably seen him make mistakes.
Quite simply, this decision is too important to be left to one man. Some politicians are content to do that because, whatever way the pandemic goes over Christmas, it will be Minister Swann who bears the responsibility. And when just one man is expected to carry the can, that kind of pressure can lead to missteps. The Executive needs to sit down and thrash this out between them. And in our opinion, they need to do the right thing and call off – or at the very least dramatically scale down – the five-day Christmas relaxations.
The prospect of a January crisis in our hospitals, of a New Year third spike, is too dreadful to contemplate and the only responsible decision can be to err on the side of caution. Not that there is any chance of a New Year increase in cases not coming about if things don’t change – it most certainly will. The only question is, what will the scale of the increase be? And with inhibitions relaxed by a heady combination of the Christmas spirit and the joy and relief of renewed contact – not to mention the complicating factor of alcohol consumption – the fear is that the worst case scenario could come to pass.
The DUP will be a brake on any move to cancel or curtail the relaxations. After all, they have at every turn prioritised business and ‘individual freedoms’ over public health. But if they have to be faced down again, then so be it. The year has been a write-off in so many respects anyway that perhaps it would even be grimly fitting that we forego what is for many the year’s most important and joyous time. For the sake of the years and the Christmases to come.
