A Very Irish Pandemic: FAH does COVID-19

## Introduction

SARS-CoV-2 was/is a corona virus which caused the illness covid-19 and the corona virus pandemic. The pandemic started in China at the end of 2019 and began to spread in Europe by February 2020. By the beginning of March, WHO classified the spread of the corona virus a pandemic. Different countries tried different measures to keep the pandemic under control, and the most common ones were wearing of facemasks, use of hand sanitiser and keep a distance of two metres to the people around you.Some countries or regional areas urged citizens to stay at home during certain hours or not go further away than two kilometres unless they had a reason to do so. Businesses that were labelled as non-essential were shut down temporary, this included theatres, bars, clubs, pubs, restaurants, shops, barbers, gyms, museums, libraries, concert halls etc. Different measures where used differently by different countries during different waves of covid. Some countries closed their schools during the first wave of the pandemic, but let them remain open during the second wave.

Here we try to capture the situation in Ireland and how FAH tackled the situation when they could not perform as usual.

## A FAHn point of view

The pandemic sketches follow the chronology of how the pandemic evolved in Ireland in terms of measures, and they become a distorting mirror of how people tried to cope.

Quarantine Maths Class Disaster is the first of the pandemic sketches. The schools in Ireland closed? and this is a try at what a remote class could look like, with technical difficulties, messing students, concerned parents, the lot.

The lockdown in remote sketches are a pretty good example of how life moved online during the pandemic: schools, religion, social interaction, exercise.

The longer the lockdown lasts, the longer people get desperate for things, such as haircuts, live music and physical contact, which is all illustrated in the sketch Black Market Lockdown Haircut.

Sports adapt to the restrictions, to be able to go on. Sports in 2020 is a take on what would happen if you put the most common pandemic restrictions and applied them to different sports. The only sport that proves to be pandemic-proof is fencing.

The first round of the pandemic sketches is finished off with Why the Hell did Lockdown have to End, aka the Lockdown Song. The song is written from an introvert's perspective on how s/he has got used to enjoy life during lockdown and will find it hard to adapt back to normal again. The lads wrote the song in three days, and it’s a brilliant way to sum up how social life was changed.

The other half of the pandemic sketches are comments to everyday life during the pandemic, such as the wearing of facemasks, bad start-up ideas triggered by the current situation, how to deal with having to tell someone you gave them covid, and of course, the thing we all waited for during the pandemic - a vaccine. Last Minute Vaccination Call is a peek at the McCormack family, where Paddy has just got a phone call from Dr Corcoran, offering him a leftover jab. Will he make it there on time? A sketch in one take in an absolutely mad tempo. You get exhausted from just watching it.