DERRY JOURNAL Editorial: Rise in COVID cases needs to stop now

A courtier - the yarn went - presented his king with a chessboard and told him all he wanted in return was a grain of rice for the first square, two grains for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth and so on.

The king agreed but was aggrieved to discover that by the 21st square of the board he owed his vassal over a million grains of rice, by the 41st square he was in debt for a trillion, and if he continued to the 64th square not all the rice in the world would have paid his dues.

The tale, cited by Meadows, Meadows and Randers in their seminal ‘Limits to Growth,’ was used to demonstrate the damage runaway growth could do to the environment.

Let’s apply it to coronavirus. The number of positive COVID-19 cases in Derry and Strabane has more than doubled in less than a month. On Sunday, September 6, there were 294 positive cases in the district.

Yesterday there were 588 and the rate of increase has sharpened rapidly. More cases were detected in Derry and Strabane over the past week than between the start of the pandemic and mid July. This needs to stop now.

The Department of Health is as clear as the Persian legend about the power of doubling but they don’t go as far back, only to Bergamo at the start of this year.

On February 23 Italy reported 132 cases, and Japan reported 144: virtually the same, DoH point out. “Japan’s doubling period was close to eight days, Italy’s was initially less than one day. Infections in Italy were therefore doubling at many times the rate of those in Japan.

Eight days later, Italy reported 1,700 cases whilst Japan reported 254. One month later (March 23), Italy reports more than 50 times the number of cases in Japan, at nearly 60,000 cases to Japan’s 1,089,” DoH warn. Let’s follow the advice and stop the rise now.