I’m unintentionally but briefly passing through Ireland again, a victim of COVID bureaucracy. When I got the first shot of AstraZenica they told me the second dose would be scheduled in twelve weeks, mid-August. I had hoped to be traveling again by then, and asked if it could be done in four instead, and they readily agreed that would be no problem.¹ Of course when I actually reached four weeks I found no way to navigate the bureaucracy to actually get a second dose; the clinic would have gladly given me one but weren’t getting anything shipped to them for months, while the hotline outright refused to schedule one for me early.

As a matter of policy, I can’t argue that’s even particularly unreasonable. I was asking for an accommodation. I can understand their unwillingness to grant one. But the uncertainty and the mixed messages — I had made plans around the assurances they had given me in April — put me in a difficult position. I wasn’t in the best of places mentally, and I couldn’t wait another couple months. So I bounced.

Of course, in the short time I was away everything changed. The Delta variant continued to spread,² Ireland cut their waiting time to eight weeks and scheduled another clinic, and so I found myself back across the Irish Channel getting my second shot of the vaccine. Once again it seemed an insurmountable effort to explain to the bureaucracy that I’d rather not spend five hours on a bus³ so I spent the weekend in Galway.

And Galway turns out to be mobbed this weekend. It’s apparently the buildup to the Galway Races Summer Festival, and if there’s a pandemic on I’ll be fucked if you’d know it from the way the restaurants are packed cheek-to-jowl. I had assumed I’d grab a bite to eat when I got off the bus but there were long lines every place I looked and the outdoor dining didn’t seem all that safe to me, so I hoofed it to my B&B and ordered in. I’m no virologist, but I’m betting we’ll be seeing a surge of cases around Galway in about two weeks.⁴

I had booked myself a few days after the vaccine to hole up in a hotel and recover — I felt pretty lousy the day after my first jab and my arm ached for the better part of a week — but other than feeling a little nauseous the morning after and having a weirdly sore throat on Monday I haven’t felt all that much out of sorts. I spent the last two days mostly in my hotel room anyway, the better to leaven the upcoming stress of travel if nothing else.

I’m finishing this write-up in Amsterdam, having cleared the border checks and arrived at my hotel. I had obsessively checked the requirements for entry⁵ and was nervous the whole time, certain I had missed something. And nope, I was asked my reason for travel, how long I was staying, and if I had a flight out booked. No questions about COVID at all.

I was glad to leave the UK before they loosened their restrictions, and I’m glad to be leaving Ireland just as they’re loosening theirs. It seems far too early, for either place, although I’ll admit I don’t really have the data to make an informed call. There’s an argument that you’re going to have a surge as soon as you reopen as people go nuts, and it’s better to get it out of the way while you still have capacity in your hospitals.⁶

Still, if I can’t stop it I’m under no obligation to wait through it. It’s clear we’re in a race against the clock, and most of the countries opening up right now are betting that they have enough vaccines going into enough arms to reduce any hospitalizations caused by Delta to a manageable level. And there won’t be a breakthrough variant that gets around the vaccines for at least a while.

Is that a good bet? I’ve no idea. What I do know is there’s a brief window right now where it seems I can safely travel, with minimal risk to myself and others. If that bet pays off, then we’re in an okay place.⁷ And if it doesn’t, if everything crashes back into lockdown in the fall, well, at least I’ll have a better idea of where I want to get stuck for the winter.

Next: Amsterdam to Ghent
Prev: Birmingham (BHX) to Dublin (DUB)

Footnotes

¹ I’ve even got them to put a notation on my vaccine card to that effect.

² And the risk calculation I had made on the efficacy of a single dose shifted accordingly.

³ At least this time the country wasn’t in lockdown, and theoretically banning trips longer than 10km.

⁴ Riding the bus into the city center I was gobsmacked to look out the window and see one of those hop-on, hop-off tours running alongside us packed to the gills. Good luck tracking and tracing those folks.

⁵ Nearly every other day for the past two weeks, including once at 6am and again at 8am before my flight.

⁶ I have no idea if that’s a good argument — again, I don’t have the data — but I find it plausible enough. There are political reasons why governments can’t come out and say “Look, we know 20% of you are going to be idiots when the restrictions are relaxed, just as we now realize 20% of you are choosing to catch and possibly die of COVID rather than willingly get vaccinated, so we’d like to get all that out of the system before we head into winter.”

From my perspective the obvious decision is to extend the restrictions, to preserve mask mandates and delay indoor dining and keep limits on group sizes while more people get vaccinated. But I don’t get a vote, so here we are.

⁷ Unless you’re an anti-vaxxer, but if that’s true you’re gonna have a bad time no matter how things go from here.