China Coronavirus

[Rossfan]

tony holahan says  their maybe over 400k cases of covid in december when ireland have had 511,045 up to now so is holahan saying that we are going to get nearly as many cases in one month than the last 18 months and thats with the high vaccination rate.

I wish your mammy would stop keeping you home from school!

[Eire90]

not my words holohan got a problem take it up with nphet or holohan

[highorlow]

I think you are the one spouting lies. In the 26 counties there are around 4000 cases, around 80 go to hospital, but half of these are unvaccinated. So about 1% go to hospital, it was more like 10% at the beginning, so the vaccines are clearly working.

If I'm spouting lies then so are NPHET with their predictions. Philip Nolan has stated that an optimistic future scenario is over 2000 people in hospital and at least 400 in critical care.

[Rossfan]

You can't lie if making a prediction 

[Gabriel_Hurl]

Is this Eire90 fella Angelo?

[JoG2]

Is this Eire90 fella Angelo?

Could be. Was about last week pretending to be an Antrim man

[BennyCake]

So Benny there's two ways of fixing it, full lockdowns till when there's a cure, or let it rip through the community until it dies out.

Which one do you prefer?

Well it looks  like it's ripping through the community rightly at the minute!  I just don't think passports are the answer. I mean, 3/4 people  from different houses could head out for a drink/meal. They may have come in the same car, so they could have spread it then without even the possibility  of spreading it around a booth/table. Yet they get entry no questions asked. And yes,  you might say as they're jabbed, infection won't be as severe. But it's still an infection, and it's still another figure, and 3/4 houses/workplaces/schools etc are now at risk from further spread.  While a passport exists, people feel like they are no danger or not at risk, because it will give them a false sense of protection (like the vaccine), and they won't care as long as they can enter the pub.

And how often on average will someone go out for a drink/meal? Once or twice a week, if that? But how many times have those same People entered other houses without masks during that week? Shared  a car with someone without masks?  Entered shops, worked beside someone?  Hospitality is  minute compared to what is happening on a  wider scale in the community. I've met people in shops who have worn masks,  yet share cars, and enter family/friends houses without masks.  Why do they wear masks in a shop to help protect strangers yet they don't wear them  to protect elderly parents, vulnerable friends/family? 

[Sportacus]

The inclusion of LFT as an option alongside covid passports is laughable.  The politicians hadn't the balls to go with mandatory covid passports, they had to water it down so that they could bullshit the complainers with an answer.  LFT is a completely useless measure in terms of outcome because unsupervised LFTs are completely open to being faked.  Now we have to go to the hassle of passports while anyone without a vaccine can just spoof their way with a make believe LFT result if they want a night out or a trip to Costa. Pointless.

[Milltown Row2]

So Benny there's two ways of fixing it, full lockdowns till when there's a cure, or let it rip through the community until it dies out.

Which one do you prefer?

Well it looks  like it's ripping through the community rightly at the minute!  I just don't think passports are the answer. I mean, 3/4 people  from different houses could head out for a drink/meal. They may have come in the same car, so they could have spread it then without even the possibility  of spreading it around a booth/table. Yet they get entry no questions asked. And yes,  you might say as they're jabbed, infection won't be as severe. But it's still an infection, and it's still another figure, and 3/4 houses/workplaces/schools etc are now at risk from further spread.  While a passport exists, people feel like they are no danger or not at risk, because it will give them a false sense of protection (like the vaccine), and they won't care as long as they can enter the pub.

And how often on average will someone go out for a drink/meal? Once or twice a week, if that? But how many times have those same People entered other houses without masks during that week? Shared  a car with someone without masks?  Entered shops, worked beside someone?  Hospitality is  minute compared to what is happening on a  wider scale in the community. I've met people in shops who have worn masks,  yet share cars, and enter family/friends houses without masks.  Why do they wear masks in a shop to help protect strangers yet they don't wear them  to protect elderly parents, vulnerable friends/family?

All good points Benny, I'm not arguing with the logic of what you're saying, I'm just saying and it's been proved, being vaccinated reduces your chances of being hospitalised. I'll take a weeks illness or not over possibly struggling to breathe or end up with long Covid.

I keep myself fit healthy and in most cases eat very well, that alone will help me, but if my strain of the virus is stronger because I didn't vaccinate and pass that on to my mother, I'd struggle to live with that, so for me it's simple, we'll continue to follow the guidelines, reduce our time with them and stay away when someone catches it, we've had three in my family get it, nephew, sister,  brother, bar being achy they were ok, double jabbed.

For me that's evidence enough, but I'm not stupid, I'll catch it, I'd rather be prepared for it, if everyone followed the guidelines, sanitise reduce capacity ventilation wear masks we'd be in a far better place even without the vaccine, some people just rage against the machine with no logic

[armaghniac]

I think you are the one spouting lies. In the 26 counties there are around 4000 cases, around 80 go to hospital, but half of these are unvaccinated. So about 1% go to hospital, it was more like 10% at the beginning, so the vaccines are clearly working.

If I'm spouting lies then so are NPHET with their predictions. Philip Nolan has stated that an optimistic future scenario is over 2000 people in hospital and at least 400 in critical care.

If 80 people a day go into hospital now and stay 12 days then 2000 in hospital only implies a doubling of the present number of cases. This does not prove your point.

[Man Marker]

The absurd theatre of vaccine passports
From magazine issue: 20 November 2021
The absurd theatre of vaccine passports
By Lionel Shriver
The Spectator


When a column highlighting under-appreciated breaking news has had absolutely no impact on the course of events (per usual), the urge to make the same point again is irresistible.

In August, Public Health England released data which shows that vaccination does not appreciably guard against Covid infection and transmission and protection worked out at around 17 per cent for the over-fifties. As I observed then, this would mean the vaxxed and unvaxxed pose a comparable danger to each other. All Covid apartheid schemes are therefore insensible.

Fresher information has fortified this conclusion of the summer. In every age group over 30 in the UK, the rates of Covid infection per 100,000 are now higher among the vaxxed than the unvaxxed. Indeed, in the cohorts aged between 40 and 79, infection rates among the vaccinated are more than twice as high as among the unvaccinated. PHE's fruitlessly rechristened body, the UK Health Security Agency, frantically clarifies that the data 'should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness', a caveat which I include for the sake of accuracy. But the differences in the infection rates are drastic enough for you to draw your own conclusions.

As for the comparative contagiousness of each group, the data is mixed. A study published in Nature early last month confirmed PHE's finding that the Covid-positive vaxxed and unvaxxed carry nearly identical viral loads; hence they should be similarly infectious. But viral load turns out to drop more quickly in the vaccinated, making them infectious for a shorter period. The study shows that 'people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a Covid-19 vaccine than if they haven't'.

The myth of ultra-contagious anti-vaxxers dispersing plague like rats has fostered gratuitous rancour
That's the good news. Now for Nature's bad news: 'But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot... Unfortunately, the vaccine's beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time.' Three months after vaccination, your chances of passing on the Delta variant are 'on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus'.

Mercifully, the vaccines' protection from hospitalisation and death is slumping slowly and remains considerable. Stress on healthcare systems and excess deaths are the only reasons Covid is a concern of government.

All this information is in the public domain. Yet due to doublethink, idiocy, mulishness, duplicity, derangement or all of the above, policy-makers are refusing to act on its implications. The absurd theatre of vaccine passports in continental Europe is worse than pointless. Gatekeeping of pleasure palaces promotes the wrong impression — statistically, the lie — that the unvaccinated riff-raff exiled to the pavement pose a far graver threat of communicable disease than the diners in the nearby banquette who, like you, have righteously got the shot. In truth, the double-jabbed airline passenger in 24A can be just as risky a seat-mate as the great unwashed banished from the flight.

Officialdom's stubborn refusal to register that vaccination does not rule out Covid infection or transmission has catastrophic consequences. As England's adult social care sector has more than 100,000 vacancies already, the compulsory sacking of unvaxxed care-home staff could close up to 500 facilities that the nation can't afford to lose. A vaccine mandate for NHS employees will likewise lead to significant staff attrition, when the service also suffers from about 100,000 unfilled jobs.

Stopped for now by the courts, Joe Biden has bullied on with his edict that all American businesses with 100 or more employees require their whole workforce to be vaccinated, or submit to onerous weekly testing, with a whopping $14,000 fine per unvaxxed hire. Austria has just implemented a lockdown for its entire unvaccinated population of two million. Already barred from restaurants, hair salons and cinemas, now these poor pariahs can barely leave the house.

The myth of ultra-contagious anti-vaxxers dispersing plague like rats in the Middle Ages has fostered gratuitous rancour and division. A friend in New York declared recently that she hoped all the unvaccinated would simply die.

By spearheading the vaccine drives, governments have attached themselves to a product. They're implicitly in league with the pharmaceutical industry, not by means of a conspiracy, but because of perceived common interest. Successful vaccine? Successful government. The mainstream media and swaths of the medical establishment have also attached themselves to the product. All these parties are in cahoots to maintain a Manichean social partition: you must be all in, or you're all against. Any appreciation for the risks or limits of vaccines casts you as a dreaded anti-vaxxer. So any feel for nuance makes you stupid. Any short-of-fanatical devotion to the perfect benevolence of vaccines makes you crazy.

Yet the product is a bit of a disappointment. It reduces death and hospitalisation, but can't stop Covid from spreading. The virus continues merrily to sweep through heavily vaccinated populations. What we have here, then, is an advertising problem. The purveyors of products are inclined to overpromise. Adverts for a hair-loss treatment tend to boast not 'Stimulates some minor follicular growth', but rather 'Cures balding!' Having oversold their adopted elixir, governments won't retreat from the cures-balding pitch. 'Won't keep you from getting sick or even from making other people sick, but prevents dying a lot of the time!' makes for a lukewarm slogan.

I'm double-vaccinated — gladly so, on balance. But I've no fear of vaccine virgins. As the medical case for shunning the unvaccinated is unconvincing, vax passports and employment mandates function purely as blackmail. As a judge decreed when staying Biden's edict: 'The mandate's true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary.'

Much western public health policy is now irrational. Governments need to detach from the product. Instead, they've detached from the facts.

[red hander]

Yeah, like I'm going to listen to the right wing bullshit of that loyalist terrorist fangirl.

[Hound]

I think you are the one spouting lies. In the 26 counties there are around 4000 cases, around 80 go to hospital, but half of these are unvaccinated. So about 1% go to hospital, it was more like 10% at the beginning, so the vaccines are clearly working.

If I'm spouting lies then so are NPHET with their predictions. Philip Nolan has stated that an optimistic future scenario is over 2000 people in hospital and at least 400 in critical care.

You're caught out as a bald faced liar. And you're excuse for lying is that it's alright to lie because you don't agree with NPHET forecasts
😂😂😂

[NAG1]

Wow things have taken a turn for the worse when some one comes in here and is posting The Spectator.

I think when you are turning to that rag it is time to take a look at yourself and maybe just not in relation to Covid either.

[highorlow]

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40702004.html

Pity this wasn't another tool in the box a long time ago.