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Those who predicted swamped ICUs, scandalous shortages of equipment and overflowing morgues in Ireland were utterly wrong. If you haven’t realised that, you’re not following.  The Irish Times, Irish Independent, RTE and other media in Ireland have failed  their democratic duty to keep the public aware of the significance of the evolving pattern of Coronavirus cases in Ireland over the last three weeks. There may indeed be “the darkest days ahead” as the Taoiseach intoned, to media head-nodding,  on Easter Sunday, but there is no evidence for it. I am not saying this to be provocative but because it is the truth. There is a pattern of reported cases it is just that the media have not followed it, or conveyed what the pattern indicates as the probable outcome of at least the first wave of Coronavirus cases and deaths in Ireland. Their job was not to convey this as a certainty but as the probability, based on the curves – the data. Instead they have plied, and continue hour after hour to ply, pictures of improvised morgues, invitations to submit stories about deceased love ones, pieces about our non-existent devastating shortages of PPE and ventilators, and of rockstars still organising emergency imports of it,  and po-faced pieces about how funerals, so central of course to Irish life,  will never be the same again.  The catastrophism is compounded by the fact that many countries and in particular the two countries from which we draw most of our external news, the US and the UK, genuinely face shortages of equipment and rampant deaths. Unlike here, in these countries the media are doing their best to reflect the context of the reality of cases and deaths.  On the other hand if we remove centres of infection like greater New York, Wuhan, Lombardy and Madrid, the rates of infection and indeed of death are really quite small (73 deaths per million in Ireland).  It is also the case that in Ireland 65% of cases come from three sectors, healthcare workers in hospitals, nursing homes and residential institutions like Direct Provision centres.   The incidences of people outside particular hotspots of this type catching Covid-19 have been low. And 90% of deaths have been of people over 65 (with the median age of death 82), mostly with underlying health conditions, “comorbidities”. The limited range of the incidences have not been reflected in reportage. And that’s apart from the numbers which we’ll come to later. So why the pessimism in optimistic Ireland? Let’s start by looking at the sequence of what happened in Ireland. The Department of Health oversaw a system underprepared for a pandemic and then specifically underestimated the dangers from China – on 20 February the Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan ineptly faced a camera and said: “We don’t expect to see anything more than individual cases occurring that we believe we’ll be well-positioned to manage within the next couple of months”.   Within a few weeks, however,  the official view had flipped the other way and by 8 March Paul Reid, CEO of the Health Service Executive (HSE) was endorsing a report in the Business Post which quoted the health authorities massively overestimating cases.   The lead story in that newspaper on that day five weeks ago predicted 1.9 million infected cases for Ireland which would have implied 68,000 deaths, since the death rate given by the WHO at the time was 3.4%.  The report did not say there “might” or “would probably” be 1.9 million cases.   Its best-selling headline on 8 March,  a date on which there had been no deaths in Ireland, was  “Irish health authorities predict 1.9m people will fall ill with coronavirus”; the subheadline was “Up to 50 per cent of cases projected in a three-week period, while the new figures raise fears of intense pressure on health service”.  The premise was that we would see 30% daily increases in cases. The smaller print of the report clarified that the prognosis depended on there being no lockdown measures.  The debate in the country seems to be premised on the 1.9 million projection, though on one level the Taoiseach has acknowledged that the 30% daily increases lasted only a few days after it was used to justify the first phase of lockdown.  There is overall a vague (accurate)  sense of a battle being won despite (inaccurate senses of) turmoil in the ICUs and, somehow, the rolling probability of an imminent surge. It is important to digest the consequences of the central countervailing fact that the daily increases in Ireland four weeks after the first salvo at a lockdown here on 15 March, when the pubs were closed, closely reflect those in China four weeks after the lockdown in China on 13 January. Crucially, if we continue to follow China within a week we will have daily increases in cases of no more than three percent and then two percent dwindling to nothing over the following couple of weeks.  There may be a subsequent rise, if we choose to reduce protections, but that is a different matter. The chart of Corona cases Ireland shows that the rate has already fallen to 8.5 percent or under for each of the last ten days, and is still reducing. It started at 30%. As a footnote, ineptly the Department of Health has excluded (as of 13 April) 2083 cases tested in Germany, though they all date from some weeks ago.  There is no advantage in including them since their exact dates remain unknown.  They do not change the pattern. As of 13 April total cases were 10,647; total deaths were 365. Over the last three weeks I have written two articles for Village following the pattern of cases in China and transposing them onto the Irish situation https://villagemagazine.ie/woo-hoo-wuhan-is-it-possible-ireland-will-be-in-the-position-china-finds-itself-in-now-in-the-first-half-of-may/ https://villagemagazine.ie/lessons-learnt-about-probable-covid-19-cases-and-deaths-in-ireland/.  I said it looked like we’d be out of the woods by the middle of May with 35,000 cases and 500-1000 deaths. As of 13 April the cases look destined to be around half that number while the deaths seem around accurate. This is despite research by Seamus Coffey in Ireland, mirroring reports from the Economist magazine about the general experience

31 January Metaphorically, if not yet  literally, coronavirus is on everybody’s lips in John Cabot, an American university  in Rome where I teach. Most of our conversations revolve around the  autocratic might shown by the Chinese government in shutting down an entire city of 11 million people, two  and a half times the population of the Republic of Ireland, and, of course, we marvel at  that time- lapse video of the hospital going up in just 10 days. Two  Chinese tourists in Rome are hospitalised with the  Corona virus, which prompts me finally to learn the name of that huge unknown city, Wuhan. I set my students a paper on epidemics, but remain comforted that  the nationality of the tourists confirms my essentially racist belief that this is a Chinese thing.    9 February On the day my father, who embodies the concept of pre-existing condition, turns 80 in Dublin, the extent of the remarkable electoral surge  of Sinn Fein is becoming apparent. I resist the temptation to triumphalism, and explain to my colleagues here in Rome, who, being professors, are practised at feigning polite interest in others’ academic obsessions, that the victory, similar to the victory in Italia 90 when Ireland hammered  England 1-1 in Cagliari, has  more to do with health and social justice than with reunification. For the next few weeks I luxuriate in long-distance outrage at the anti-SF  machinations of Fine Gael and, especially, Fianna Fáil – the real class traitors. 21 February Two  people, not Chinese, are hospitalised in Padua, one of whom then becomes the first Italian fatality. Seventeen new cases appear in Lombardy. The  Italian government announces quarantine measures for anyone who has been infected.  22 February The region of Lombardy suffers its first coronavirus death, bringing Italian fatalities to two. There are 79 recorded infections in the country.  23 February Today is my son’s 21st birthday. He is up north in Tyrol skiing with friends. I worry slightly  about enclosed cable cars full of coughing  and snuffling  holidaymakers from northern Italy. I just hope my son won’t bring it home with him, because now, with  25 new cases in Veneto, the ghastly symptoms of the disease are being talked about. When my sleep apnoea  jolts me awake at night gasping for breath, it now takes me longer to calm myself. A third person dies in Crema (Lombardy); there are now 152 recorded infections.  My old schoolmate Eamon Ryan, whose father, Bob,  was a very kind mentor to me in the Dublin of the 1980s, is putting a brave face on the poor showing of the Greens. England hammers Ireland at Twickenham, and my interest in the  6 Nations tournament, Italy being my other team,  evaporates. Surgical masks vanish from pharmacies in Italy. 24 February Three more deaths in Lombardy, one in the beautiful hill-top town of Bergamo, from whose city walls, on a rare clear day when the mists and industrial smog of the Po Valley  have dissipated,  the  view extends all the way to Milan, which stands at the centre of what is essentially a single vast city the size of seven provinces. Only by looking for the 16th-century  bell towers and 20th-century chimney stacks  is it possible to distinguish from the  sprawling conurbation  the industrial and post-industrial  towns of Stezzano, Dalmine, Brembate, Trezzo sull’Adda and, in the distance,  Monza, Cologno Monzese, and Gorgonzola, and finally, the dim outlines of the new skyscrapers of Milan, markers of the stubborn economic survival of this part of the country in the midst of Italy’s  25-year-long economic slump.  25 February The Italian government closes schools, universities, public offices, museums and lawcourts in the regions of Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont and Liguria. Travel outside the infected zones is prohibited. 27 February Veneto now has 111 cases, 42 of them in the tiny hamlet of Vò. Two of its inhabitants die, and over the next few days everyone there is tested. Less than 2% are positive. Cases are reported in Tuscany and  Emilia-Romagna, where the victims are reported as having returned from abroad, almost as if to emphasize the non-endemic nature of the disease.  Ireland gets its first case, a woman who travelled from Dublin to Belfast  and thus solomonically resolved the problem of which side of the border deserved the first blame.  28 February My daughter flies from Rome to Dublin to interview my father for her Master’s thesis on Irish literature. She packs a surgical mask – an extravagance, but my father is poorly, and people are beginning to look askance at Italy. Touchy about these things, I detect some cultural stereotyping in Ireland and the UK of the tactile, gesticulating  all-living-together Italians, an attitude that  my father’s late friend Edward Said would have called orientalism.  3 March Covid-19, as the infection is now being called, reaches the French-speaking region of Aosta, the last hold-out of Italy’s twenty regions. My daughter returns from Dublin, having not met my father face-to-face after all, but having stayed with my active and healthy mother (81). Rumours begin to circulate in my university that the students, most of whom are non-Italian, might take fright and start returning to their homes. My classes remain full. An Irish woman who returned from Italy becomes the second case on the island of Ireland and the first in the Republic.  4 March Owing to the impossibility of quarantining only some cities and provinces, the Italian government of Giuseppe Conte  issues an emergency decree declaring  the entire country subject to restrictions of movement, and orders  schools and universities across the entire country closed.     5 March My university calls a meeting of all professors and instructors, and tells us to prepare for remote teaching. The closure almost coincides with the spring break, which mitigates the sense of upheaval. Even so, the mood at the meeting is an odd mixture of detached amusement, disbelief, confusion  and anxiety.    6 March The Ireland v. Italy rugby international, my least favourite game of the tournament, is suspended, but Italian fans from the rugby-playing north of the country continue to  arrive in Dublin. The number of  recorded cases in Italy now exceeds 3,000, almost all in Lombardy and Veneto. The death toll is 107.  7 March  My daughter and her boyfriend along

One would have to have to be stonehearted not to have pity for any author releasing a book this year and, in particular, one which deals with the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, now bogged down in disputes as to how to handle coronavirus with justice. Events have rapidly overtaken Colum McCann’s latest novel, ‘Apeirogon’ (Bloomsbury), which he writes in his cover notes is a “hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling which, like all storytelling, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact and imagination”. Note well that “fact and imagination”. Accordingly, the writer throws the reader into the lives of real people and real horror but allows himself the freedom “to shape and reshape their words and their worlds”. That is both ambitious and more than a little difficult to navigate. Then add in the question as to whether or not a Dublin writer, now resident in New York, will be able to contribute something imaginative about this area which will be better than its own writers: Amos Oz, David Grossman; Eshkol Nevo;  Sayed Kashua; Mourid Barghouti or Naguib Mahfouz, among others. It is a big challenge but one which McCann is perfectly entitled to undertake. After all, writers are imaginative beings and if he can bring something of value to the reader, and something that is believable, then let’s have it.  In an Irish context, a parallel would be with the American writer, Lionel Shriver. She spent many years in Belfast and her novella, ‘The Subletter’, is a first-class example of how an intelligent and thoughtful writer can wring something vital and illuminating out of a very fractious place that is not native to her. Still, McCann is not off to a good start with the book’s title, ‘Apeirogon: a novel’. It is unnecessarily obtuse. The book, sorry, “this epic novel”, is named for “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides”. Even after reading the explanation, many will not be sure what that is.  Yes, reviewers are supposed to know everything – they do not – but no-one, reader or reviewer, wants to think of themselves as being, well, thick. (And “countably”?) Still, this is a substantial book in pages, over 450, that “crosses centuries and continents, stitching time, art, history, nature and politics into a tapestry of friendship, love, loss and belonging”. The reader is also promised something that is “musical, muscular, delicate and soaring” which, even for a blurb, is grandiose. Taking as his starting point the violent deaths of two real young girls – one Israeli, Smadar, and one Palestinian, Abir – McCann attempts to create a narrative about the actual friendship that developed between their two grieving fathers, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin (pictured), and has done so with their blessing. This then is fiction that is based on fact; a re-imagining of real death and is a profoundly unsettling undertaking for any reader. How it counts as fiction, as a novel, even a hybrid novel, is something this reader found difficult to understand. Were it a television programme, it would undoubtedly be classed as a ‘docu-drama’. In a long series of short chapters and lines, McCann charts the physical landscape of Israel and Palestine and the psychological toll it exacts on its inhabitants. “Geography here is everything”, the author reminds us as he lists various zones and their restrictions, depending on whether you are Israeli or Palestinian. While effectively describing the areas, the overall effect is quite leaden. McCann, thanks to research visits to the region, is very apt at providing detailed lists and observations but he does not manage to distil that often enough into fiction that flies.  The constant short chapters read like something from a guide book – “Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year” and he iterates the flocks exhaustively. Yet the detailed knowledge never translates into something more substantial.  Worse, McCann’s habit of offering up little lines here and there jars more often than it enlightens. There are good lines in the text – “The highway is a scattershot of morning headlights” – but there are too many lonely lines that hang meaninglessly as stand-alone ‘chapters’ – “A swan can be as fatal to the pilot as a rocket-propelled grenade”; “Rami’s licence plate is yellow” or “The rim of a tightening lung” – which often give the impression of being a poor man’s aphorism after Nassim Taleb. The text is also interspersed with small photographs or illustrations, a Sebald-like gambit to provide more authenticity.  The violence of the young girls’ deaths, and their aftermath, are clinically described: “The bullet that killed Abir travelled fifteen metres through the air before it smashed into the back of her head…” and “… the splattered tablecloths, the severed torso of one of the bombers like a Greek statue-piece in the middle of the street”. It is, to be honest, a description that could have been written about many scenes in the North over the years. Abir is killed by a rubber bullet. McCann tells us were fired from M-16s and “were first tested in Northern Ireland…”. That is wrong. The rubber bullets in the North were fired from a weapon that resembled a single-barrelled, sawn-off shotgun and were solid rubber the size of a man’s fist.   (Indeed, a young girl was killed by one in the area of Belfast where this writer grew up, which underpins the fact that you do not have to go to the Middle East to find such tragedies.) No-one could fault McCann’s engagement with his subject and his honest attempts to portray a very dangerous and divided region. Regrettably, the whole things smacks of “if this, then that” sort of writing. One is not looking for McCann to take sides but just to say something, to free his inner Houellebecq. But then to do that, McCann would have to have a story to tell, his story, and a definite point of view that might offend some readers