Sir, – I find Paul Callan's article ("Ireland: Best small country in the world for pandemics?", September 30th) which reviewed how Ireland weathered the Covid pandemic to represent a very weak analysis of how well we performed.
The glaringly obvious point to make is that of course a country that enforces one of the toughest and longest lockdowns in the world will have a lower Covid-related death rate than many other countries.
The key question to ask is why did our Government decide on a policy of relatively limited Covid testing with a tough, prolonged lockdown?
Other countries followed a policy of test, test and test, along with short and less severe lockdowns.
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For example, Denmark, a country similar in size to Ireland, routinely completes about 10 times as many PCR tests per week than Ireland. Their approach to tackling the pandemic was to focus on a massive ongoing campaign of PCR testing (as advised by the World Health Organisation), and they had less reliance on lockdowns.
Ireland’s focus was on long, hard lockdowns, with a much smaller regime of PCR testing.
The result? Denmark has had fewer Covid cases and about 50 per cent fewer Covid deaths than Ireland.
Did our Government decide on this policy of limited testing (compared to many countries) and long lockdowns?
Or did we simply stumble on to this policy and then decide not to change it, not to explore what was working better elsewhere with a view to changing tack?
These are the critical questions that must be answered in any review of our response to the Covid pandemic.
– Yours etc,
PETER KERR,
Castletroy,
Limerick.