Cork Doing Unreal At Reducing Covid Cases

17th Feb 2021

With Cork doing so incredibly well on the covid league table over the last few weeks, we should take some time to slap ourselves on the back. In fairness, as humble as we Corkonians are, we don’t give ourselves half enough credit for being as brilliant as we are.

It’s not in our nature to blow our own trumpet or to go on about how great Cork and everyone who lives in it, is. In fairness though, despite the grim winter and being confined to our gafs, sometimes we should cut ourselves some slack and treat ourselves to a little vial of self-satisfaction.

Since January, we’ve been unreal in getting our numbers down. We have done so well that when all this is finished, Corkonians should get some kind of reward from the World Health Organisation or the Noble Prize, or a pet bat from the Mayor of Wuhan that we could keep in the Lord Mayor’s office at City Hall next to his collection of bees and wasps (#AllHivesMatter).

Despite having the second largest urban area in the country, every area of Cork city and county is now well under the 14-day national average. On January 11^th there were nearly 700 new cases in Cork. Last Sunday there were just 28. Lads, come on like, that’s savage going.

Here’s the thing though. If counties with consistently high numbers aren’t willing to put in the effort to reduce their numbers, but Cork’s cases continue to fall and go on to dip well below where we were last September, then surely there is a case for schools across the Rebel county to reopen regardless of what’s going on in Not Cork.

Dublin is a complete disaster. And covid is as bad as ever up there too. Their porous airport is acting like an industrial sized sewer pipe blowing new strains of covid into the country as well as facilitating thousands of holiday escapees swanning in and out of the country with dodgy letters from dentists in Lanzarote.

Here’s a simple solution: blow up the landing strips - no runways means no run-aways!

There are definitely enough fireworks leftover from Halloween, hidden under beds around the city and enough young fellas with experience in small scale explosives that we could send up a battalion to take Dublin airport out in one go (and the Instagram post of the display would be amazing).

Wash Down Your Lobby
Every week another lobby group or cabal of special interests line up in the national media to call for “certainty”, for a “timeline for reopening” or just a date that might allow us to get bazzers.

Even with the inherent unpredictable nature of covid-19, the government often appears to be at sixes and sevens even with even the most basic decisions like what form the leaving cert will take.

Poor students have borne the brunt of the shamblefest with the education minster continually flip-flopping: one day it’s written exams, the next day it’s calculated grades. The day after it’s ‘sure whatever you’re having yourself, Patsy’.

In the time it has taken herself and her department to make a final decision (which may yet be reversed), a certain Young Scientist of the Year winner and leaving cert student in Bandon could have devised a cheap machine learning program to accurately assess every pupil in the country.

(Bear in mind that this is the department that still insists on posting physical payslips to tens of thousands of teachers in the country every month at eye watering cost! Young Gregory Tarr could probably knock out some code on his lunchbreak to send them by email instead and save €2.1 million a year on postage!). 

Rebels need to hold firm and stay steadfast in their pursuit of getting to and staying in the relegation zone in the covid-league. Shortly, we will reach the point where Corkonians will begin to ask why the government keeps schools closed in Beara and Ballycotton just because half of Ballymun have brought covid back from spoof “medical appointments” in Tenerife.

Counties, like Cork, that get their case numbers down should be rewarded for their sacrifice.    

Although, the controversial zero-covid strategy seems to be exclusively demanded by academics whose lofty salaries are entirely insulated from the pandemic, one thing that really caught our eye about it is the need to completely seal off of areas of the country from others once they reach zero covid – like they’ve done in New Zealand and Australia.

With Cork’s case numbers continuing to slide south, that sounds very interesting to those of us pursuing a sovereign, independent and pure daycint People’s Republic.

So, if we have the zero-covid advocates right, what they’re saying is, Cork would effectively become an independent state with a hard border, as long as we have no covid, but everywhere else in Ireland did.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s time to double down on the restrictions for a few more weeks and push for the biggest reward of all – freedom!!

And, maybe hold off on that “firework display” at Dublin airport for a bit.

Keep up the good work, Cork.