I think you have to place context to it which I think you are missing. We had come out of a lockdown in November with the promise of opening up for Christmas, at the end of a challenging year. Looking back now its very easy to say we shouldnāt have done it but there was a lot of pressure to open from businesses and the general population (and many on here Iād wager). Matt Hancock announced the Kent variant on 14th December and that played havoc.
Could things have been done better? Probably, in hindsight.
All international travel should have been stopped in March 2020. You could safely resume at a reasonable level with mandatory testing before and after travel. Allowing in 30k visitors from a hot spot like the UK in December with no testing requirement was simply insanity.
I agree it was insanity. Passenger numbers at Dublin Airport for December 2020 were 291,000, so 30k coming into the country for Christmas seems like a very conservative figure.
Ireland took the most restrictive approach to travel in the EU from summer 2020 onwards. Did it have substantially better outcomes? We also had the most enduring restrictions. I think we did have quite better outcomes than other EU countries from that stage on for the most part.
You would have been far better off if you had come out of lockdown in May and kept sensible restrictions in place. Lockdown fatigue is a real thing, it is the primary reason for the devastating winter wave in California which had the longest lockdown in the US and has had 63k deaths.
I donāt think we had a very restrictive approach to travel. I am open to correction on this, but my understanding is from the start of the pandemic, Finland shut their borders/travel from Sweden for all but nine days in September 2020.
We did, the most restrictive approach to travel in the EU throughout the pandemic.
I donāt know exactly what border restrictions the countries listed had in place but I remember Finland banning arrivals from Ireland early this year when we had the highest rates in Europe, so clearly they didnāt have borders closed all the time.
How did Norway and Finland achieve their low death rates, 14 and 17 deaths per 100k?
Ireland is at 100, Sweden 142, France 167, UK 187, Italy 208, Czech Rep 280, Hungary 310. Looks like the range for the rest of Europe is 100 to 300 with Ireland and Sweden towards the bottom of the range.
