Making sense of publicly available data on COVID-19 in Ireland

This paper reports on the management of the COVID19 pandemic in Ireland over the period March to May 2020. During this period the Irish government implemented a series of policies designed to delay the spread of the pandemic culminating in a stay-at-home order that greatly restricted mobility for the majority of the population. In this paper we evaluate the policies enacted using evidence obtained from a number of novel sources, including census and real-time traffic data. The evidence suggests that the policies have impeded the spread of the virus, which has mostly been confined to Dublin and its commuter belt. At the same time, the virus has become concentrated in a number of clusters associated with nursing homes and workplaces that remained open during the delay phase. This evidence is used to hypothesise on the likely impact of the pandemic on high density and poor neighbourhoods in Dublin.