China Coronavirus

[five points]

Serious question - Did many Italians come to Dublin that weekend?

I can't find anything to suggest Dublin was packed with Italians that weekend, maybe someone in and around the City could provide some insight?

Good question too.

Here's a possible answer from twitter, dated 8 March.

Deric Ó hArtagáinTV @deric_tv Mar 8
16 million Italians quarantined but they can still get a flight to Dublin!! Can some explain to me WHY there are still flights coming into Ireland from Northern Italy?? Is lockdown not lockdown?? Public health is top priority nowPolice cars revolving light #COVID19ireland #COVID19 #coronvirusireland

Veruska Anconitano @LaCuochina
Replying to @deric_tv @ShaneRaftery and 4 others
Jesus, it's not hard to understand: it's for Irish coming home! Italians cannot travel outside of the red zones and trust me, they don't have any desire to come to Ireland now and get stucked here. Seriously, this is ridiculous and ignorant!
9:34 PM · Mar 8, 2020 from Dublin City, Ireland·Twitter for iPhone
1 Retweet
30 Likes

[Square Ball]

And and response from any government representative will be... We followed the advice of ..... Or we followed the scientific advice and repeat and repeat.

[seafoid]

https://www.ft.com/content/5357d014-822f-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714

A Cambridge university project on "resilient normality" has crowdsourced 275 suggestions: they include stripping doors of handles in public places, delivery drones, rotas for school attendance and free rental bikes to reduce transport overcrowding. Any kind of normality lies some way off, but science offers the safest and quickest path out of the woods.

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-identifies-275-ways-to-reduce-spread-of-coronavirus-following-lockdown

[upmonaghansayswe]

We have 19,877 cases but undertaken 153,954 tests. So for every positive case who are the other 7 people being tested?. How can many of them not be contacts, as you suggest?

I said I was unsure whether they were family members tested or not.

How many people do you think you were in close proximity to in the past 3 weeks?

Shopworkers? Neighbours? Other shoppers? A ratio of 1:7 is not high enough.

[I don't know what the figures are elsewhere - statista.com was completely wrong on numbers here, no reason they're any less wrong elsewhere.]

Figures from Gov.ie so I'm going to believe them.

So no other comparable country (bar the ones i listed) has done any more testing per population than we have and yet you say a ratio of 1:7 is not high enough. I don't think that is a reasonable stance. 

[Captain Obvious]

Uk estimate of all excess deatgs due to coronavirus (hospital, home, nursing home) now 46,000

https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1255183452527374337

The UK is paying for decisions made in March
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/revealed-three-uk-sporting-events-may-have-led-coronavirus-death/

The Cheltenham Festival, Liverpool's tie with Atletico Madrid and the Manchester derby all resulted in more coronavirus cases and deaths

It's a good thing that there was no Irish at those games or Cheltenham, Leo was on the ball early

Cheltenham is such a false flag, certainly didn't help but public transport barely gets a mention as a spreading vehicle. The London underground- 2m people per day before, during and after Cheltenham, along with every other form of public transport in the UK and Ireland.

Eh, you're comparing a non essential leisure event with a transport system holding one of the major cities in the world together. London was and is continuously mentioned as a major hotspot for the virus
250k odd sweaty drinkers hugging and coughing / slabbering over each other for days on end before departing to the 4 corners of Ireland and the UK. I personally know a GP who tested positive after he came back and him in contact with the most vulnerable.
Cheltenham should not have happened and should rightly be mentioned... Whoever gave the green light is carrying a heavy burden at this stage

Cheltenham brought people from all over, infected them and sent them home to infect people when the R number was at least 2.5. 1 infected person at Cheltenham with the R at 2.5 would have meant 406 infected after 30 days.
The Atletico match brought infection from Madrid and embedded it in Liverpool.
The UK now has the worst numbers in Europe. FT estimate 46,000 excess  deaths

Confirmed amount of deaths for the UK at the moment is 21,678. If true that's some load of virus deaths not counted.

I'd wonder how many tourists from around the world still came to Ireland after St Patrick's day was cancelled?

[armaghniac]

We have 19,877 cases but undertaken 153,954 tests. So for every positive case who are the other 7 people being tested?. How can many of them not be contacts, as you suggest?

I said I was unsure whether they were family members tested or not.

How many people do you think you were in close proximity to in the past 3 weeks?

Shopworkers? Neighbours? Other shoppers? A ratio of 1:7 is not high enough.

[I don't know what the figures are elsewhere - statista.com was completely wrong on numbers here, no reason they're any less wrong elsewhere.]

Figures from Gov.ie so I'm going to believe them.

So no other comparable country (bar the ones i listed) has done any more testing per population than we have and yet you say a ratio of 1:7 is not high enough. I don't think that is a reasonable stance.

Ireland has a creditable record on testing, but perhaps it still just falls that bit short.
Portugal, not necessarily known for its public administration, has an excellent record on testing and many fewer cases, so that level of testing is probably sufficient to keep things under control. Ireland has more cases and so needs more testing to be able to test contacts etc.

Confirmed amount of deaths for the UK at the moment is 21,678. If true that's some load of virus deaths not counted.

Half the cases here, and in most European countries, were in nursing homes and the like, if you do not count them then you are falling short.

[bennydorano]

Uk estimate of all excess deatgs due to coronavirus (hospital, home, nursing home) now 46,000

https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1255183452527374337

The UK is paying for decisions made in March
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/revealed-three-uk-sporting-events-may-have-led-coronavirus-death/

The Cheltenham Festival, Liverpool's tie with Atletico Madrid and the Manchester derby all resulted in more coronavirus cases and deaths

It's a good thing that there was no Irish at those games or Cheltenham, Leo was on the ball early

Cheltenham is such a false flag, certainly didn't help but public transport barely gets a mention as a spreading vehicle. The London underground- 2m people per day before, during and after Cheltenham, along with every other form of public transport in the UK and Ireland.

Eh, you're comparing a non essential leisure event with a transport system holding one of the major cities in the world together. London was and is continuously mentioned as a major hotspot for the virus
250k odd sweaty drinkers hugging and coughing / slabbering over each other for days on end before departing to the 4 corners of Ireland and the UK. I personally know a GP who tested positive after he came back and him in contact with the most vulnerable.
Cheltenham should not have happened and should rightly be mentioned... Whoever gave the green light is carrying a heavy burden at this stage

One largely open air, the other in confined spaces - the danger of infection so much more dangerous on enclosed transport. It was unnecessary surely but it's impact has been overstated IMO. How many people flew, sailed, travelled on trains, tubes  within and between the British isles in the same period? Easily dwarfs Cheltenham numbers I'd say. It was a high profile, easy target.

[Milltown Row2]

Uk estimate of all excess deatgs due to coronavirus (hospital, home, nursing home) now 46,000

https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1255183452527374337

The UK is paying for decisions made in March
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/revealed-three-uk-sporting-events-may-have-led-coronavirus-death/

The Cheltenham Festival, Liverpool's tie with Atletico Madrid and the Manchester derby all resulted in more coronavirus cases and deaths

It's a good thing that there was no Irish at those games or Cheltenham, Leo was on the ball early

Cheltenham is such a false flag, certainly didn't help but public transport barely gets a mention as a spreading vehicle. The London underground- 2m people per day before, during and after Cheltenham, along with every other form of public transport in the UK and Ireland.

Eh, you're comparing a non essential leisure event with a transport system holding one of the major cities in the world together. London was and is continuously mentioned as a major hotspot for the virus
250k odd sweaty drinkers hugging and coughing / slabbering over each other for days on end before departing to the 4 corners of Ireland and the UK. I personally know a GP who tested positive after he came back and him in contact with the most vulnerable.
Cheltenham should not have happened and should rightly be mentioned... Whoever gave the green light is carrying a heavy burden at this stage

One largely open air, the other in confined spaces - the danger of infection so much more dangerous on enclosed transport. It was unnecessary surely but it's impact has been overstated IMO. How many people flew, sailed, travelled on trains, tubes  within and between the British isles in the same period? Easily dwarfs Cheltenham numbers I'd say. It was a high profile, easy target.

A profile target that didn't need to be on, now at the time of Cheltenham, how many people had died of Covid in the UK? One death in hindsight should have been enough to cancel the event, flights in and out of Ireland should have been stopped, only rescued flights put on, this is where Leo didn't act, along with others as New Zealand closed theirs. And now they are back to a better normal.

This needs to be done on wave 2, let's see who reacts first

[RadioGAAGAA]

We have 19,877 cases but undertaken 153,954 tests. So for every positive case who are the other 7 people being tested?. How can many of them not be contacts, as you suggest?

I said I was unsure whether they were family members tested or not.

How many people do you think you were in close proximity to in the past 3 weeks?

Shopworkers? Neighbours? Other shoppers? A ratio of 1:7 is not high enough.

[I don't know what the figures are elsewhere - statista.com was completely wrong on numbers here, no reason they're any less wrong elsewhere.]

Figures from Gov.ie so I'm going to believe them.

So no other comparable country (bar the ones i listed) has done any more testing per population than we have and yet you say a ratio of 1:7 is not high enough. I don't think that is a reasonable stance.

Germany and Russia might have higher per head testing rates (nearly double) than ROI - but those numbers are from statista.com - so not sure how much to trust them. [That was in my original reply, but removed due to uncertainty of data]


For proper testing & tracing to work, it has to be able to work back through all possible transmission points over the last 2/3 weeks. That is almost certainly gonna be more than 7 people for anyone not cocooning in the country. Hence 1:7 is still insufficient.

BTW - its not a race to be "better" than anyone else - its a race to be good enough to control spread without a one-size-fits-all policy.


The ROI are now starting to test on the kind of scale that will be required, and credit to them for that.

https://www.gov.ie/en/news/7e0924-latest-updates-on-covid-19-coronavirus/

Update on testing
in the past 7 days (Monday 20 - Monday 27 April 2020) - 41,470 tests have been carried out
of the 41,470 tests, 5355 (12.9%) resulted in positives
a total of 153,954 tests have been carried out in Ireland so far
current lab capacity is for 60,000 tests per week. By the end of this week, that figure will reach 70,000. By the third week of May, that figure will reach 100,000 per week. An average of 4,000 tests per day (28,000 per week) are currently being referred

100k/week is 2% of the population could be tested every week.

In the UK, even after their ramp up to the envisaged 100k tests per day, is only at half that per head as the ROI.

[Maroon Manc]

A mate who works at a hospital had mild symptoms so was tested and turn out he had it but his girlfriend whom he lives with tested negative for it, don't see how she wouldn't have got it. He seems to think there's an issue with the testing.

[GetOverTheBar]

A mate who works at a hospital had mild symptoms so was tested and turn out he had it but his girlfriend whom he lives with tested negative for it, don't see how she wouldn't have got it. He seems to think there's an issue with the testing.

Genetics, she might just have a stronger system.

[GetOverTheBar]

Some interesting articles on Sweden -

One line actually stuck out for me -

Herd immunity "has historically been nature's way of ending pandemics," added Dr. David Katz, the public health physician who helped kick off the debate in an essay he wrote in The New York Times on March 20 and in a follow-up interview we did together.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/medical/lockdown-free-stockholm-could-achieve-herd-immunity-in-may-claim-by-swedish-ambassador-as-she-reveals-30percent-of-the-citys-population-already-have-immunity/ar-BB13mSu9?li=BBoPWjQ

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/how-sweden-is-dealing-with-the-coronavirus/ar-BB13mdYn?li=BBoPWjQ

[screenexile]

Uk estimate of all excess deatgs due to coronavirus (hospital, home, nursing home) now 46,000

https://mobile.twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1255183452527374337

The UK is paying for decisions made in March
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/revealed-three-uk-sporting-events-may-have-led-coronavirus-death/

The Cheltenham Festival, Liverpool's tie with Atletico Madrid and the Manchester derby all resulted in more coronavirus cases and deaths

It's a good thing that there was no Irish at those games or Cheltenham, Leo was on the ball early

Cheltenham is such a false flag, certainly didn't help but public transport barely gets a mention as a spreading vehicle. The London underground- 2m people per day before, during and after Cheltenham, along with every other form of public transport in the UK and Ireland.

Eh, you're comparing a non essential leisure event with a transport system holding one of the major cities in the world together. London was and is continuously mentioned as a major hotspot for the virus
250k odd sweaty drinkers hugging and coughing / slabbering over each other for days on end before departing to the 4 corners of Ireland and the UK. I personally know a GP who tested positive after he came back and him in contact with the most vulnerable.
Cheltenham should not have happened and should rightly be mentioned... Whoever gave the green light is carrying a heavy burden at this stage

One largely open air, the other in confined spaces - the danger of infection so much more dangerous on enclosed transport. It was unnecessary surely but it's impact has been overstated IMO. How many people flew, sailed, travelled on trains, tubes  within and between the British isles in the same period? Easily dwarfs Cheltenham numbers I'd say. It was a high profile, easy target.

https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2020-04-23/legitimate-questions-over-whether-cheltenham-festival-may-be-linked-to-coronavirus-deaths/

[Rossfan]

Has any medical guru or body established that getting the virus gives you immunity?

[RadioGAAGAA]

A mate who works at a hospital had mild symptoms so was tested and turn out he had it but his girlfriend whom he lives with tested negative for it, don't see how she wouldn't have got it. He seems to think there's an issue with the testing.

I think the tests aren't 100% accurate - but they are way better than the alternative.