Leo Varadkar was asked if he had anything to say to reassure people at home who will be afraid.

"I think we're all a little bit afraid and it's perfectly natural and normal to be a little bit afraid. You know, we can all see what's happening in Spain, what's happening in Italy, only two or three hours' flight from here and that frightens us all."

Contrast his answer with Donald Trump's when the US president was asked the same question last week.

Social distancing is working - chief medical officer Tony Holohan said that the average number of close contacts among those with the virus has dropped from 20 to five - but the truth is that neither politicians nor scientists know if it's working quickly enough. The big surge of cases has yet to hit the hospitals.

But perhaps more significant in the medium term is the breaking of austerity : the admission that what is written in stone : 3% deficit and all that : can just be overridden like that, in the service of a greater imperative.

And with all due respect to the thousands dead and yet to die, there is a greater imperative confronting modern civilisation, and we all know it.

Financing a Green New Deal just got a whole lot easier.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

governments need to deploy massive fiscal stimulus, including through "helicopter drops" of direct cash disbursements to households. Given the size of the economic shock, fiscal deficits in advanced economies will need to increase from 2-3% of GDP to about 10% or more. Only central governments have balance sheets large and strong enough to prevent the private sector's collapse.
But these deficit-financed interventions must be fully monetised. If they are financed through standard government debt, interest rates would rise sharply, and the recovery would be smothered in its cradle. Given the circumstances, interventions long proposed by leftists of the Modern Monetary Theory school, including helicopter drops, have become mainstream.

Some brains will implode, and it's about time.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

UK coronavirus live: Boris Johnson faces MPs in Jeremy Corbyn's last PMQs as leader of opposition

Stats to date: watch death rate per 1M population:
Germany - 1.92. [1.5]
USA - 2.45. [1.8]
China - 2.36. [2.35]
UK - 6.4. [5.0]
Netherlands* - 16.1. [12.4]
France - 16.5  [12.8]
Iran - 23.6  [22.9]
Spain - 64.0  [50.0]
Italy - 113.0  [101.0]

Graphic of major cities - here

The number of deaths in the US will likely total 30K by June.

* Three Northern provinces in The Netherlands have an insignificant number of cases and deaths aided by extensive testing.

It took a crisis as cruel and enormous as the one we are facing to finally hear an Irish minister announce a national health service.

In asserting this week that all private hospitals would be public or run by the State for the duration of the pandemic, Simon Harris said "There can be no public versus private here", alongside the Taoiseach's commitment that "public and private patients will be treated equally".

The Taoiseach also invoked the ghosts of the War of Independence era; that it is necessary for us to match "their courage or example" and that we can surpass them in showing "our greatest generation was not in the past". One way to give meaning to that is to ensure this pandemic permanently alters the approach to equality of health access and care.

---<Snip>---

But the politics of Irish healthcare ensured the War of Independence veterans never achieved a national health service based on equality between all patients, as powerful vested interests, including senior members of the Catholic Church and private medical practitioners, joined forces to supposedly defend the interests of patients against "state bureaucracy" or "socialised medicine".

Then, and for decades afterwards, reform of the health services was bedevilled by the haughty and destructive sulks and blocking mechanisms of powerful interest groups who refused to embrace change in the interests of the wider community and often emerged triumphant from encounters with reforming politicians.

---<snip>---

This requires not just crisis leadership, but ongoing leadership: as the nurses collectively put it in their submission to the Oireachtas healthcare committee: "Shaping, forming and sustaining this single-tiered, universally accessible, public health service (including ownership and delivery) will require political consensus stretching far beyond the normal electoral cycle.

"It will require this, and future, governments, and oppositions, to accept that the transformational change required cannot be interfered with for political reasons."

In Spain, austerity legacy cripples coronavirus fight

That changed in 2011, as the economy spiralled downward and a newly elected conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy embarked on a program of heavy spending cuts. He started by slashing a combined €10 billion from the health and education budgets and kept up an austerity program for much of his tenure, which ended in 2018.

Investment in the health care sector has dropped from 6.8 percent of GDP in 2009 to 5.9 percent in the government's most recent draft budget -- far below the current EU average spending of 7.5 percent of GDP.

As a result of the cuts, a "growing number of newly trained doctors were unemployed or migrating to other countries," an EU report noted last year.

The austerity measures have also led to a number of shortages, specifically a decline in the number of hospital beds and a rise in temporary contracts for doctors and nurses, the report said.