China Coronavirus

[Milltown Row2]

See that old ground over there - let's all go over it again.

But did they actually walk on the moon? Can you get covid on the moon and if so did they have any problems during the flu season of 2018?

Answers on a post stamp

[bennydorano]

The number of provisional deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 12 March 2021 is lower than the 5 year average for week 10.

https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/1374296236778528768?s=19

[Milltown Row2]

The number of provisional deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 12 March 2021 is lower than the 5 year average for week 10.

https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1/status/1374296236778528768?s=19

Why do you think that is?

Less spread of flu due to lockdown better sanitation masks  or just government led conspiracy?

[RadioGAAGAA]

I know normal minded people about a year ago now full on conspiracy theorists, they have obviously picked it up sitting at home bored or gotten so frustrated they believe it now.

Yes... 'cos thats what governments do.

They sit in their ivory towers, stroking their white cats - plotting with No.1 on ways they can completely f**k up their economies, wipe tens, if not hundreds of thousands off their own savings/investments and make themselves infamous in history.

That's exactly what governments do.

You are replying like in some way its my view.

Yes... it certainly hasn't been your view for the past 12 months or so. [/sarcasm]

[GetOverTheBar]

I know normal minded people about a year ago now full on conspiracy theorists, they have obviously picked it up sitting at home bored or gotten so frustrated they believe it now.

Yes... 'cos thats what governments do.

They sit in their ivory towers, stroking their white cats - plotting with No.1 on ways they can completely f**k up their economies, wipe tens, if not hundreds of thousands off their own savings/investments and make themselves infamous in history.

That's exactly what governments do.

You are replying like in some way its my view.

Yes... it certainly hasn't been your view for the past 12 months or so. [/sarcasm]

Did they ever close the airports or the ports in the end?

[Milltown Row2]

I know normal minded people about a year ago now full on conspiracy theorists, they have obviously picked it up sitting at home bored or gotten so frustrated they believe it now.

Yes... 'cos thats what governments do.

They sit in their ivory towers, stroking their white cats - plotting with No.1 on ways they can completely f**k up their economies, wipe tens, if not hundreds of thousands off their own savings/investments and make themselves infamous in history.

That's exactly what governments do.

You are replying like in some way its my view.

Yes... it certainly hasn't been your view for the past 12 months or so. [/sarcasm]

Did they ever close the airports or the ports in the end?

On reflection they should have, and I was very sceptical at the start that this would have been lunacy but other countries have seen the benefits of it and reaping the rewards

[imtommygunn]

(hindsight is a wonderful thing) Without doing this we didn't really stand a chance.

[GetOverTheBar]

Of course they should have, if we knew then what we know now. I wonder when the next pandemic breaks out.....hopefully not in my lifetime obviously, would that be something that is a straight away reaction by countries. It would make sense learning the lessons from Covid 19 surely.

But people were under the illusion that we could have adapted the NZ / Australia model. It's impossible with Europe an hour away and the UK 20 mins on a plane and still to this day to stop travel, infact, it's airlines themselves that was the major driver in the prevention of travel.

The legal and political implications for Ireland/Northern Ireland means that closing our borders was never going to happen - unfortunately that's been to our cost. It should be as easy as pulling the plug but this place that backward and that contrary it was never even on the menu, let alone table. But again, with the UK being across the way and mainland Europe. which were both messes at the very start, how successful would it have been really - did you ever see the actual list of exemptions for people that don't have to quarantine for example? IT workers, Health workers etc. Its mad.

[Milltown Row2]

Of course they should have, if we knew then what we know now. I wonder when the next pandemic breaks out.....hopefully not in my lifetime obviously, would that be something that is a straight away reaction by countries. It would make sense learning the lessons from Covid 19 surely.

But people were under the illusion that we could have adapted the NZ / Australia model. It's impossible with Europe an hour away and the UK 20 mins on a plane and still to this day to stop travel, infact, it's airlines themselves that was the major driver in the prevention of travel.

The legal and political implications for Ireland/Northern Ireland means that closing our borders was never going to happen - unfortunately that's been to our cost. It should be as easy as pulling the plug but this place that backward and that contrary it was never even on the menu, let alone table. But again, with the UK being across the way and mainland Europe. which were both messes at the very start, how successful would it have been really - did you ever see the actual list of exemptions for people that don't have to quarantine for example? IT workers, Health workers etc. Its mad.

Its an Island and going forward that is the best thing to do, the only use of flights and ports would be to bring in produce. Nip it in the bud at the start, that has to be an all island approach and anyone set against that is committing economic suicide

[Armagh18]

Of course they should have, if we knew then what we know now. I wonder when the next pandemic breaks out.....hopefully not in my lifetime obviously, would that be something that is a straight away reaction by countries. It would make sense learning the lessons from Covid 19 surely.

But people were under the illusion that we could have adapted the NZ / Australia model. It's impossible with Europe an hour away and the UK 20 mins on a plane and still to this day to stop travel, infact, it's airlines themselves that was the major driver in the prevention of travel.

The legal and political implications for Ireland/Northern Ireland means that closing our borders was never going to happen - unfortunately that's been to our cost. It should be as easy as pulling the plug but this place that backward and that contrary it was never even on the menu, let alone table. But again, with the UK being across the way and mainland Europe. which were both messes at the very start, how successful would it have been really - did you ever see the actual list of exemptions for people that don't have to quarantine for example? IT workers, Health workers etc. Its mad.

I don't get this whole argument of the UK only being so far away and Europe being close. If you shut the borders what does it matter how far away the UK is? Not as though they're swimming across?

[sid waddell]

We had four cases of Covid on July 1st

What we know now, we also knew last summer, or had the ability to know

We just chose to let Covid back in rather than crush it

Varadkar was again denigrating Zero Covid as an extremist idea last evening

This is a concerted gaslighting campaign - what we've been doing since last summer has been the real extremism

Fintan O'Toole had a line in his article yesterday where he compared the Zero Covid countries to a fox who knew a lot of small things, while we were a hedgehog who knew one big thing

But I didn't think that was a well taken line at all

The Zero Covid countries were in fact foxes who knew one big thing - and the one big thing was everything - everything else they knew flowed from that one big thing

We know or claim to know so many small things now that we're totally confused - but we refused to learn the one big thing

So we're stuck furiously debating utterly pointless nonsense like the difference between 5km and 10km limits for exercise

They don't have these debates in New Zealand or Australia, they're too busy going to music festivals

[GetOverTheBar]

Of course they should have, if we knew then what we know now. I wonder when the next pandemic breaks out.....hopefully not in my lifetime obviously, would that be something that is a straight away reaction by countries. It would make sense learning the lessons from Covid 19 surely.

But people were under the illusion that we could have adapted the NZ / Australia model. It's impossible with Europe an hour away and the UK 20 mins on a plane and still to this day to stop travel, infact, it's airlines themselves that was the major driver in the prevention of travel.

The legal and political implications for Ireland/Northern Ireland means that closing our borders was never going to happen - unfortunately that's been to our cost. It should be as easy as pulling the plug but this place that backward and that contrary it was never even on the menu, let alone table. But again, with the UK being across the way and mainland Europe. which were both messes at the very start, how successful would it have been really - did you ever see the actual list of exemptions for people that don't have to quarantine for example? IT workers, Health workers etc. Its mad.

I don't get this whole argument of the UK only being so far away and Europe being close. If you shut the borders what does it matter how far away the UK is? Not as though they're swimming across?

Essential/Key workers can travel to and from, with no quarantine restrictions (depending on your role) at present, i.e. Health Care, IT, Legal...there is a load of them. Northern Ireland is obviously the weakness.

The argument re: closing borders is, closing it to everyone off the island of Ireland full stop.  You can't do that when Northern Ireland for all intents and purposes is Governed by the United Kingdom - not as if Dublin is going to take on the financial cost at the minute so we are basically in the shit.

Normal people like us think, who cares. Close the country down. It's that simple and it should be that simple. The reality was politically it was never, ever going to happen when the biggest party in NI would rather see Covid run rampant than acknowledge the kryptonite to their very being....Ireland is one lump of land. And look that's just one example, that's not to beat the DUP with a stick, not like any of them are reading this but the Northern Ireland situation has really been shown for what it is now. It's always been a long term sticky plaster.

[seafoid]

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-somebody-mcsomebody-is-spreading-covid-in-ireland-1.4517066Fintan O'Toole: Somebody McSomebody is spreading Covid in Ireland

We have chosen not to properly track the virus. The result is endless lockdown
Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 01:05


Who is most responsible for spreading Covid-19 in Ireland? Somebody McSomebody.

Among the acts of genius in Anna Burns's great novel Milkman is the way the narrator names people without naming them. One nasty character is called Somebody McSomebody. As it happens, the same reprobate is the villain of our Covid story. He/she/they is to blame for the stubbornly high levels of transmission of the coronavirus.

In the medico-political discourse that dominates our lives, Somebody McSomebody goes by an alias: community transmission. The term is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "the process of infectious illness spreading through a large group of people in a general way so that the source of the infection in a particular case is not known".

As Prof Anthony Staines put it in The Irish Times last week, community transmission, or "community spread" as Nphet likes to call it, is "no more than a socially acceptable version of 'We have no idea where this infection came from'. "

We don't know because we don't ask. We don't ask because we have not, more than a year into the pandemic in Ireland, built a system of contact tracing that is remotely capable of figuring out how, when and where a chain of infection got going.

Consider two pieces of official advice to us, the general public. The HSE explains: "The incubation period for Covid-19 is on average five to six days, however, it can be up to 14 days. It is now known that during the incubation period, those infected can spread the virus to other people." The HSE also explains: "If you test positive and have symptoms, the contact tracer will ask about people and places you have visited 48 hours before your symptoms started and until you started self-isolating."

Fintan O'Toole: The Covid-19 pandemic should be the last hurrah for Irish stoicism
Fintan O'Toole: anti-lockdown sentiment given undeserved credibility by political failings
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So: you may have been spreading the virus for 14 days, but we're going to ask you about the two days before you became symptomatic. You don't have to be an epidemiologist to see the problem here. We have a time machine but it doesn't travel back far enough to see where any outbreak started.

Why? Because that's the way we've built it. In October, as the second wave was really hitting us, a total of 300 people were working as contact tracers. Everybody knew this was grossly inadequate.

DIY tracing
By October 22nd, by which time there were 500 tracers, the system was in meltdown. That weekend, people who tested positive got text messages from the HSE asking them to forward the message to their own contacts and urge them to arrange a test – DIY tracing. Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said, "This was a one-off situation where demand outstripped supply and a one-off operational decision was made to reset the system."

It wasn't a one-off situation. At the end of December the system was so overwhelmed that the basic protocols for tracing had to be dumped. The agreed procedure had three stages. First, if you tested positive, you got a call from a medical professional. Then you got a call from a tracer. Then the tracer followed up with your close contacts. To avoid the complete collapse of the system, this was telescoped into a single call from a tracer, who then texted the contacts to urge them to isolate.

So we know that the tracing system has come close to implosion twice in the past six months. It now has 873 staff – a significant improvement, but not remotely enough to trace infections back to their origins in Ireland.

We've chosen to stick to the known unknown. But the problem is that this absence of evidence is claimed all the time as evidence of absence.

Whenever it suits its purpose, any given group can claim that what we don't know is actually a form of proof. Look, they say, there is hardly any evidence of transmission through schools, or pubs, or restaurants, or church services, or international travel, or construction sites, or whatever.

Of course there bloody well isn't. We just don't do that kind of tracing. Beyond the mates or family members you met in the past 48 hours, there's just Somebody McSomebody who got Covid from Somebody McSomebodyelse.

No point
What the people in charge will say is that there is no point in doing this deep tracing because it would simply overwhelm the system. This is entirely true, but it's also self-fulfilling. We never had the will or the urgency to build a system that would not be sunk if it pulled too hard at the hidden roots of infection.

This matters because the countries that have managed this pandemic best are the ones that have used contact tracing to do what we don't: hunt the virus down to the clusters that are spreading it and move in ruthlessly to suppress it. This allows most ordinary life to go on without lockdowns. It's the difference between playing whack-a-mole and shutting down the whole funfair.

Or, to use the famous analogy, between the fox who knows many small things and the hedgehog who knows one big thing. We chose to know one big thing – lockdown – and not to know the many small things that make up the Irish pandemic. As a result, we're stuck in hedgehog mode, curled up and bristling.

[Milltown Row2]

Of course they should have, if we knew then what we know now. I wonder when the next pandemic breaks out.....hopefully not in my lifetime obviously, would that be something that is a straight away reaction by countries. It would make sense learning the lessons from Covid 19 surely.

But people were under the illusion that we could have adapted the NZ / Australia model. It's impossible with Europe an hour away and the UK 20 mins on a plane and still to this day to stop travel, infact, it's airlines themselves that was the major driver in the prevention of travel.

The legal and political implications for Ireland/Northern Ireland means that closing our borders was never going to happen - unfortunately that's been to our cost. It should be as easy as pulling the plug but this place that backward and that contrary it was never even on the menu, let alone table. But again, with the UK being across the way and mainland Europe. which were both messes at the very start, how successful would it have been really - did you ever see the actual list of exemptions for people that don't have to quarantine for example? IT workers, Health workers etc. Its mad.

I don't get this whole argument of the UK only being so far away and Europe being close. If you shut the borders what does it matter how far away the UK is? Not as though they're swimming across?

Essential/Key workers can travel to and from, with no quarantine restrictions (depending on your role) at present, i.e. Health Care, IT, Legal...there is a load of them. Northern Ireland is obviously the weakness.

The argument re: closing borders is, closing it to everyone off the island of Ireland full stop.  You can't do that when Northern Ireland for all intents and purposes is Governed by the United Kingdom - not as if Dublin is going to take on the financial cost at the minute so we are basically in the shit.

Normal people like us think, who cares. Close the country down. It's that simple and it should be that simple. The reality was politically it was never, ever going to happen when the biggest party in NI would rather see Covid run rampant than acknowledge the kryptonite to their very being....Ireland is one lump of land. And look that's just one example, that's not to beat the DUP with a stick, not like any of them are reading this but the Northern Ireland situation has really been shown for what it is now. It's always been a long term sticky plaster.

Whether its ever going to happen or not, its the logical thing to do, as we are what we are that wont happen

[Angelo]

I hope this thread is archived and logged because some of you guys are going to lack back at your former selves and realise what a pillock you were.

South Africa is another good example.

23k daily cases now down to 1k daily cases.

That's the result of a lockdown, right?

WRONG. South Africa had not lockdown and it has the experts perplexed.

Lockdowns do not work.