Why is coronavirus killing so many more people in the UK than in Ireland?

The choices our governments have made in the last month have profoundly shaped what risks we, as citizens, are exposed to during the course of this pandemic. Those choices have, to a large extent, determined how many of us will die.

At the time of writing, 365 people have died in Ireland of Covid-19 and 11,329 have died in the UK. Adjusted for population, there have been 7.4 deaths in Ireland for every 100,000 people. In the UK, there have been 17 deaths per 100,000. In other words, people are dying of coronavirus in the UK at more than twice the rate they are dying in Ireland. Yet, despite Ireland being your closest neighbour, this has barely been mentioned in the British press.

In Ireland, we consume a great deal of British media. This means that we’ve been watching, with growing despair and grief, British news reports chronicling a national disaster. But for weeks now, long before the death rate accelerated, we’ve been watching and reading your reports with a queasy feeling. We knew of the measures and plans the Irish government was putting in place to protect us and we knew how far your government was slipping behind.

When our taoiseach was closing our schools and universities, your prime minister was still telling you to wash your hands. When our government cancelled St Patrick’s Day celebrations, yours allowed the Cheltenham Festival to go ahead and, with it, a potentially massive multi-day super-spreading event of over 250,000 people. The contrast was disorientating.

Nowhere was the dissonance more marked than on the weekend before St Patrick’s Day. By that point, Ireland had banned indoor gatherings of more than 100 people, but had stopped short of closing the pubs. A video showing revellers in Temple Bar went viral; a public outcry ensued; #closethepubs trended on Irish Twitter; the minister for health commented; and voluntary pub closures began the following morning.

That same weekend, thousands attended a gig in Cardiff:

I remember watching the video being posted on Twitter that Saturday night and feeling sick to my stomach. How many people were being infected, at that very moment, singing along to the Stereophonics? I say this not to shame the band; their decision to go ahead with the gig was informed by government guidelines. But while their gig was permitted in the UK, it would have been banned in Ireland. I assume there were people in Cardiff who felt the same way I did. The difference was that I was supported by my government. They weren’t.

Pandemics grow exponentially, so that infections seem to rise slowly, and then all at once. Every day counts. A week’s delay in mid-March would yield an outsized effect on the deaths to come in April. This means that the contrasting choices of the UK and Irish governments in March mattered.

Technically, the UK went into lockdown before Ireland, on 23 March, but Ireland was already operating a “delay phase” from 12 to 27 March. I would argue that the crucial difference in approach lies in this two-week period from 9 March, when Ireland cancelled St Patrick’s Day, to 23 March, when the UK government finally initiated a lockdown. Because the Irish government moved quickly, we seem to have interrupted our pandemic’s exponential curve at an earlier point. In mid-March, our models forecast 3,000 new coronavirus cases a day by the end of the month. In reality, we had a daily increase of less than 300, one-tenth of that predicted. Our government’s measures worked.

Comparisons between countries inevitably run into difficulties. Overall, Ireland has a lower population density than the UK, which arguably slowed transmission of the virus. However, a larger proportion of the Irish population is centred around the capital city: 39% of us live in the Greater Dublin area, whereas Greater London holds 16% of the population of England. We’re a highly connected population, concentrated to the east of the country, all of which works against us in a pandemic. Given the ease of transmission of the coronavirus within the family home, another factor becomes relevant: the average household in Ireland is larger than that in the UK. Other comparators are more grimly equivalent: both Ireland and the UK began the pandemic with roughly equivalent levels of ICU beds, just over half the EU average.

It’s probably too early to know for sure whether the UK government’s delays, set against the Irish government’s action, made a decisive difference. However, we do know that people in the UK are currently dying more than twice as fast as their neighbours across the Irish Sea. Ireland has also been testing for the coronavirus at twice the rate of the UK (at least). Given that the UK Department of Health’s daily statistics only include deaths in hospitals where there has been a positive coronavirus test, your lack of testing is probably depressing your figures.

More importantly, the daily death toll released by the Irish government includes deaths in nursing homes and the community, whereas the UK daily releases do not. EU figures suggest that half of all deaths may take place in care homes, and their exclusion from the daily UK figures is puzzling. If we adjust the Irish figures so that they match the UK criteria, and include only deaths in hospitals, the differences between us are even more stark. In that calculation, almost three and a half times as many people have died of the coronavirus in the UK as in Ireland.

The best time to plant an oak tree was 20 years ago; the second-best time is now. The best time to stop this pandemic was in January. The second-best time is now. And while we’re working this ground together, it would be good to remember that over the fence, in the neighbouring allotment, Ireland is tackling some of the same problems as the UK. It might be worth taking a peek over the fence sometimes, to see what we can share.

• Elaine Doyle is a writer and researcher