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A VIRUS HAS broken out in Ireland. It’s a deadly virus, with a 98.6% fatality rate.
You are one of six people on Ireland’s Catastrophe Citizens’ Assembly. You’re in the situation room and you have to decide: What group of people do you give the vaccine to?
A – Give it to 10,000 randomly selected citizens
B – Give it to 10,000 of the top doctors and vaccine researchers
You vote, the results are read out and you debate (this is the part where you lose all faith in the future of humanity).
The 10,000 randomly selected people should get the vaccine because if the virus spreads, we’ll need to recreate society with an even mix of people. Doctors and researchers should be saved to try to invent more vaccines (we’re assuming that the 10,000 vaccine doses aren’t replicable).
But there aren’t 10,000 top researchers and doctors in Ireland, someone argues. Another says that you’re assuming there’s no international help to invent a vaccine solution.
The Catastrophe Citizen’s Assembly votes for Option A. Next scenario.
Of the randomly selected 10,000, 250 were citizens in prison, 250 were terminally ill and 2,000 were elderly. We should:
A – Still give it to these people
B – Give it to 2,500 people instead
The idea that the vaccine would be administered randomly was the whole point of option A in the first question – so based on that, you should stick to the logic in the second scenario.
But there are lots of shades of grey in this one – could you offer the vaccine to those who are terminally ill, and if they refuse, give them to some of the children? But if you give it to 2,500 children, how do you select which children get to live?
If we went with Option A, here’s where it would lead:
We fairly distributed the vaccine, but the pandemic is spreading. Masses of people are dying all over Ireland and just a small population has been vaccinated in time. We should:
A – Institute mandatory reproduction programmes, freeze eggs, sperm and embryos of all living capable people – it doesn’t matter if they are incarcerated, ill, young or old.
B – Migrate to mainland Europe.
Again you debate, and you decide. It’s all part of an apocalyptic exhibition to get people thinking about what they would do in an end-of-world scenario.
Science Gallery
The Situation Room is the Science Gallery’s own creation, and asks its visitors to take part in Black-Mirror-like riddles around the survival of mankind.
It’s about weighing up risk, ethics, probability and the likelihood of survival. Sometimes it’s about valuing some lives above others (depending on how you voted above).
The Situation Room also sports a “Cards for Humanity” game, where players are dealt cards with different reactions on them, and have to use the best option for the situation they’re dealt.
One such situation included:
“A large earthquake has cracked the sewer pipes under Dublin. Before thousands of citizens contract cholera from contaminated drinking water, the city needs to _____.”
“Use as few resources as possible”, “invest in cyborg research” and “just don’t stare at the sun” are among the options you can choose.
Apart from the Situation Room, there’s an exhibition that looks at different survival kits, another that examines how quickly a virus can spread based on interconnected flights between the major world cities, and another that examines the extinction of creatures and how deeply we care about it (not that much, unsurprisingly).
There’s also a series of portraits in the style of copybook scribbles of how to survive, which includes “How to make a boat out of the remains of a gas station” and “Constructing a mobile border wall” (see also how to filter your water and what insects are safe to eat).
In a darker corner of the room in the upstairs part of the Science Gallery, a wall of paintings examines how humans might communicate danger to one another if languages were erased. It includes a poisonous blue forest, boxes of radioactive waste and spikes jutting out of the ground as possible threats – leaving the viewer to decide how best to warn people in generations to come.
Ahead of the exhibition’s launch last night, director at Science Gallery Lynn Scarff said that in general, humans are “bad at preparing for dangerous, low-probability events” despite those types of events being featured in programmes and films all the time (The Walking Dead, and The Day After Tomorrow, for example).
Scientists working in fields as disparate as immunology and astronomy are researching topics that could have a very real effect on our ability to prevent, prepare for, or survive a catastrophe.
“We should think carefully about our plentiful cultural conversations about catastrophe, where science and culture are colliding before our eyes, before it’s too late.”
You can visit more on the Science Gallery’s website.
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Fair play to the Irish government. They have done a great job steering the ship.
@Sean Minihane: Only since July 2021
@Paul Hedderman: yup, all the planing just magically appeared in July.
@Tony Gordon: Vaccine rollout aside did they really do a good job “steering the ship” in your opinion?
@Paul Hedderman: yes they did, in my opinion. Their 2 biggest missteps was not planning sufficiently for nursing homes at the very beginning, which in fairness every country got wrong. And then reopening in December at the beginning of the Delta outbreak. Aside from that we have done very well, far better than most of Europe.
@Ger: Delaying locking down for the first lockdown when other European States were locking down around us and covid confirmed a few weeks prior. No engagement with highly effected sectors. Lack of communication to public, conflicting information, leaks. Conflicting rules. Not allowing businesses to open sooner when they could operate safely. Only telling us socialising outdoors was safe just before the summer when it suited their agenda. Not preparing schools properly. Not implementing mass rapid testing, to name but a few…….. Re christmas (UK variant) they had to ease restrictions, public would have gone mad and ignored them if they didnt, that wave was inevitable as it started weeks before easing, with new variant, Christmas and 2 months of level 5 prior it was the perfect storm.
@Sean Minihane: RTE will be disgusted. They are still trying to stir it.
It has been a remarkable achievement. Let’s hope it continues.
All the overly dramatic commenters posting ‘open the pubs’ on here every day for the past 18months should have a look at that Bloomberg article and see how much more restrictive the lockdowns were in other European countries.
@Niels: Exactly, imagine your priority in the middle of a pandemic being whether the pubs are open or not , a horribly negative benchmark to use.
@Niels: only 5 European countries on the list higher than us for restrictions, 6 if you include Turkey…… We’re only in the top 10 in that chart of only 53 countries since mid summer. Article is titled “The Best and Worst Places to Be as We Learn to Live With Delta”…. Not “countries have performed the best through the whole pandemic”…. Vaccine rollout was a great success. Handling of the first year and a bit of it was shocking by govt, particularly the start… I’d take that report with a pinch of salt. Our universal healthcare score is 90 somehow and I wonder how much weight GDP growth forecast goes towards the rank. Hard to see how were better than Denmark when they have more vaxd, better healthcare, less restrictions, nearly half the cases and deaths compared to us since delta.
@Paul Hedderman: they also don’t share a border with the UK who have been a disaster throughout the pandemic, that’s a massive point going in their favour
@Paul Hedderman: I don’t understand how we managed to knock Norway off the top spot to tell the truth, As John just pointed out to you, we share a land border with the UK, but Norway shares with Sweden and when you compare those two, the difference is purely due to the difference in the paths taken by the authorities of both countries.
@Paul Hedderman: Sorry, hit wrong key. Anyway, that said, I’ve no issue with our government’ response, and as to various comments of only since the mid summer, it is a report that is done monthly, so depending on how it goes, we may be further down the list again next month.
Great government leadership and commitment from all in the health service. Very proud of our efforts.
I’m happy with it- come at me.
@murt de murty: wont be long now ;)
While not perfect, it certainly could have been better.
But credit where it due, we did a decent job….and still are.
And v little congrats to The minister for health. How the shinners piled on to him
And the public never doubted the government for a second
Proud of the majority of Irish people not succumbing to the nonsense and believing is good science.
@Tony Gordon: Indeed! Long may it last!
Open the pubs properly!
@Wolfgang Hanratty: Try harder
@Wolfgang Hanratty: did you get a thrill saying that?
@Joe_X: open the pubs and reverse the smoking ban.
And free plastic bags while you re at it.
@Anarch Eco: A right rebel, you are!
Enda was right. We’re the best little country in the world to get Covid in.
We won
@Jonathan:
We are winning, unfortunately this is not beat yet…
Let’s just hope Tony got this right and opening will be handled…
Still 1 in 5 from 18 to 49 are not vaccinated… we can do better there, that would massively reduce the risk of another lockdown…
Feck the begrudgers is my favourite old Dublin saying It could have been invented for the comments section of the Journal.ie.
Pity it took a year to implement hotel quarantine
It could have been so much better, especially with fumble after fumble in 2020 and the worst implementation of quarantine ever. We made it across the line eventually though with an excellent vaccination rate. Government can’t take credit for that.
@Paul Cunningham: The vaccines fell out of the sky then did they?
@Paul Cunningham: But they learned as they went from the mistakes, which is the important thing. Remember, for most people, this is a once in a lifetime event. Very few who lived through the Spanish flu pandemic of just over a hundred years ago are alive today. It’s not as if any government knew what to do when it kicked off, and the next time something like it occurs, hopefully, not at least for another hundred years or more, mistakes will be made again for the exact same reason.
‘The next two weeks are vital’ – still it implies an intelligent educated population in this country
Remembering when New Zealand’s Ms Ardern said last year: ‘I was just looking at Ireland, their stepping down is taking them through to July before some people are back in work.”
I disagree when they say that Ireland was the worst in the world at the start of the year.India was actually the worst in the world.
Looks great when you apply the Trump formula for bringing down the numbers. Stop doing tests and the positivity numbers drop. Or someone has an underlying health condition and dies with Covid then they didn’t die of Covid according to Leo the leak. Don’t report the daily deaths and Looks like we’re heading in the right direction.
Bualadh bos! Aren’t we great! All we had to do was throw away everything our ancestors fought for! They’re spinning in their graves now but shur we can hook them up to the grid to make up for the shortfall in power caused by closing Irish power stations and giving away our electricity to data centres. We’re a great little country!
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