Read the winners of our Covid-19 Student Journalism competition
Junior Category winner: Tiernan Finn, 2nd Year, St Josephs College, Garbally, Ballinasloe, Co. Galway
It’s the new silence that I hear the most. The trucks that I used fear cycling to training are fewer now, but there is no training and meeting with my friends either. I miss that messing, running, laughter and playing with my team and winning, losing and trying. I miss the mud, exhaustion and goodies in the Club or the chicken fillet roll from the deli on the way home.
The silence reveals new noises in the clean air. I hear breezes whispering and hiding around corners as I walk. I hear so many birds and their chorus all over the day, especially at dawn. I notice the new silence at Dusk too when they disappear into the bare trees when the dark falls and are safe away from the foxes, badgers, mink, stoat and the red squirrels that inhabit the whispering woods behind our house.
My brothers are home from college and I like that. I can dig in the vegetable garden any time I want. I have it ready to plant out the seeds that I have been germinating on the windowsills in the house to provide our food. I can sow my carrots, onions, leeks, beetroot, lettuce and cabbage even-though I won’t eat many of them yet.
It’s a challenge to keep my dog Bundee from digging them up after I have them planted because he is very curious and enthusiastic flying around my garden patch. And as I watch him tearing around I think of all the children in towns and cities locked up with no gardens and no place to play and I feel sad for them.
It’s a terrible thing to say but I miss school, the routine and the crack with my friends. I still do the homework sent to me on my tablet, but it’s more difficult and less real without the teachers, or most of them anyway!
Over two years ago I bought a baby calf with my savings and reared and minded him. Two days ago I sold him to the factory but the price has fallen because of the lockdown and I got less for him than I was expecting because demand has dropped as lots of people have lost their jobs and are spending less on food.
I live on a farm and am lucky that the Coronavirus has not affected me as much as others. I worry for my mother who has to work so hard as a nurse in the hospital, that she will be in danger and also bring it home. She is careful to follow the guideline to reduce the risk and my hands have never been so clean.
I try not to listen to the news or go on social media too much and I just live every day as It comes.
I hope this passes soon but I don’t think everything will go back to how it was, but this might be a good thing if we learn from it.
Intermediate Category: Clare Reidy, Transition Year, Our Lady’s Bower, Athlone, Co. Westmeath
Households of grown adults around the world are going back to maths they first learned whilst wearing school uniforms.
Exponential growth, SIR models, the basic reproductive ratio; these are just a few of the mathematical buzzwords that have entered everyday vocabularies of people across the globe in the last few weeks. World leaders are calling to ‘flatten the curve’ and slow the growth rate of the coronavirus. Newspaper articles are filled with graphs predicting when the number of cases will peak. Even Conor McGregor, hardman and self-styled Irish ambassador, is talking about implementing harsh measures to ‘halt the exponential growth of the disease.’ It goes without saying that mathematics and mathematical modelling has become extremely prominent in the reporting of the coronavirus pandemic.
Unless you were keen on maths in secondary school, your memories of the period may consist mainly of sitting at the back of a maths class learning about exponentials, calculus, logarithms, and asking yourself ‘When am I ever going to need to know this?’ I’m sure maths teachers around the country are experiencing a certain level of vindication in watching the news these days because, Teacher ár Lá, their day has come!
News coverage on the coronavirus is filled with mathematics: rates and data, charts and graphs, projections and probabilities. A more advanced level of numeracy is fundamental to understanding the current crisis and all that mathematical knowledge built up over the years finally has some real-world applications.
When creating a mathematical model, the population is broken up into ‘compartments,’ sorting people into different categories. A basic version is an SIR model, with three terms: susceptible, infected, and recovered/ removed. Some models also drop in an E—SEIR—for people who are exposed but not yet infected. Then variables such as the infection rate, the recovery rate and the death rate are factored in. An estimation for each number is assigned, slot the numbers into a few formulas, and let it run. That is essentially how these models are created.
Mathematical models are vitally important in this time of crisis. They are responsible for answering questions such as: How rapidly will the virus spread? When will it reach a peak and how quickly will it die out? As well as this the models strongly influence the government’s decisions on implementing guidelines to minimise the spread of the virus and crucially, when such guidelines can be lifted. So maybe think twice the next time you get bored in a maths class… you never know when all that seemingly useless information might come in handy.
Senior Category winner: Evan Carron-Kee, St. Columba’s College, Stranorlar, Co. Donegal.
Once this crisis has passed, Ireland will return to recovery. How do we ensure that this time, matters such as mental health, homelessness, and climate are given the attention they deserve? What kind of Ireland will students like me grow up in? To guide our recovery, the CSO should be employed to create three new indicators. They will be crude by design; the
goal is not to inform policy but to provide the electorate with an indication of how the government is performing, and in the process match the incentives for politicians with the needs of the public. Let’s call them the Recovery Indicators – one each for our economy, our wellbeing and our climate.
First, the economy. There is something wrong about a society in which measures of economic health and homelessness can rise in tandem. A good economic indicator must be tailored to the Irish economy and to this crisis. Modified GNI is a good starting place – growth in the real economy should be combined with housing costs and data on small businesses, who will be hit hardest by the pandemic. Crucially, this indicator must be presented clearly to the public, so that voters can see how the economy is working for normal people.
This crisis will not only hit our pockets; it will hit our happiness too. If the local football club can’t pay its running costs or a bookclub doesn’t meet again after the crisis, the harm to our society is real and measurable. Inexplicably, the CSO does not measure wellbeing regularly – they should devise a quarterly indicator that would combine the prevalence of mental health issues, life satisfaction and participation rates in all pastimes, from ciorcail comhrá to yoga.
Such a statistic, although crude, would shine a light on an element of society which is particularly vulnerable to this crisis.
Finally, there’s climate change. Environmental security clearly can’t be at the top of the next government’s to-do list, but it should be a close second. Encouraging our politicians to solve the climate crisis is taxing at the best of times; an objective measure of their success might concentrate some minds in Leinster House. We need a single number which combines,
among other things, the ratio of economic growth to emissions growth and the proportion of fiscal stimulus spent on mitigation – building flood barriers and the like. With some smart thinking, environmental security and recovery need not be mutually exclusive.
This is not a perfect solution. Like all statistics, the Recovery Indicators will be at times misleading and vulnerable to misuse. However, the point isn’t to create a detailed account of what’s happening in the nation. The point is to create three numbers that will roughly track the progress of the recovery, so that voters can easily assess government policy. As a sixth year student, I’m going to have to enter the real world very soon – let it be one that values real progress, even in the bad times.
