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FIVE YEARS AGO WE WOKE UP TO DEADLY REALITY OF VIRUS

- NEIL LESLIE

• Being in Covid bunker where health chiefs doled out data on a nation's fight for survival now feels like a fever dream

• Surreal time of nightly death tolls & rock star medics....but newspapers brought humour & hope throughout

IT was the room where much of it happened.

Five years ago this week Leo Varadkar told us we needed to talk about coronavirus.

And this makeshift briefing room in a squat office building on Dublin's Baggot Street would become Ground Zero for a lot of that discussion.

It became the stage from where the leading members of a previously unknown group within the Depart- ment of Health would hold a nightly address to the nation.

For almost two years it was also the Ground Zero for fear, the epicentre of an earthquake rippling out in seismic circles onto the airwaves and newspapers, as the tectonic plates of our lives shifted violently.

Each evening I would drive the near- deserted streets to cover these surreal daily briefings by the men leading the National Public Health Emergency Team.

Most were scheduled for 5.30pm to reach the greatest number of people on the evening news bulletins.

Having signed in and made an ostenta- tious show of sanitising your hands, it was a short walk to the NPHET briefing room.

Like many public spaces, it was heavily bedecked with the stark yellow and black livery of Covid-19.

You would take a socially distanced seat and await the arrival of those leading Ireland's pandemic response.