‘Reckless’ Christmas rule relaxation blamed for Ireland’s dire Covid surge
Ireland emerged from a six-week lockdown in early December with the European Union’s lowest coronavirus infection rate.
It eased restrictions in belief it could contain a rise in the virus over Christmas unlike, say, Germany and the UK, countries that had more than four times the level of infection. Then all hell broke loose.
From mid-December, the virus started ripping across Ireland, gaining a speed unimagined in the worst-case scenarios and forming an almost vertical line that rushed up, up and up to give Ireland, on Monday, the world’s highest rate of Covid-19 infection.
The country’s seven-day rolling average is 1,394 cases per million – outstripping the UK on 810, Portugal on 735, the US on 653 and Germany on 248. On 12 December Ireland recorded 52.31 cases per million people. By Sunday the figure was 1,322.92.
Data compiled by Johns Hopkins…
