China Coronavirus

[Angelo]

Anyone who listens to that quack McConkey as a credible source is need of sectioning.

[Captain Obvious]

McConkey has been one of the most responsible public voices during the whole thing

We need much, much more of him and much, much less clueless internet blowhards like you

As I told you already he's been less than responsible with his over the top death predictions.

Last week he came on the news talking about vaccines and he literally made zero sense. Contradicted himself a few times, was rambling a lot and mumbling answers. A complete and utter bluffer

On the contrary, he was spelling out what could happen - and he was entirely correct to do so

That's proper, responsible public messaging

You're an internet blowhard who thinks they know more than than McConkey

You should get onto the Royal College of Surgeons, see if they agree 

For the record Parkinson and McKenna I believe are gobshites so don't think I'm on their side. My point is on how you seem to think Sam Mcconkey is acting responsible.

For the last year he's talked up the worst case scenarios as high possibility and I can't even imagine what that is doing for mental health for those watching especially the elderly that are locked in their homes for a year and such talk is far acting responsible. RTÉ, Virgin are as much to blame as anyone for this for wheeling him out when they need another dose of misery.

[sid waddell]

McConkey has been one of the most responsible public voices during the whole thing

We need much, much more of him and much, much less clueless internet blowhards like you

As I told you already he's been less than responsible with his over the top death predictions.

Last week he came on the news talking about vaccines and he literally made zero sense. Contradicted himself a few times, was rambling a lot and mumbling answers. A complete and utter bluffer

On the contrary, he was spelling out what could happen - and he was entirely correct to do so

That's proper, responsible public messaging

You're an internet blowhard who thinks they know more than than McConkey

You should get onto the Royal College of Surgeons, see if they agree 

This is Goebbels levels of propaganda.

McConkey has zero credibility at this point.

Always with the illiterate Nazi references

Oh the irony, when you've actually been proposing a holocaust for the best part of a year

[Milltown Row2]

Our CMO keeps moving the goalposts

Only 5 weeks ago the vaccines were our way out of this. Only today he said the vaccines are not the way out of this.
Why is he giving radio interviews is beyond me. Advise the government and give a briefing every week. But when he is on every airwave most days is annoying

3 cases in Omagh Fermanagh

Milltown have you got the slippers on. I'd say you haven't done much in a year.

Which part of being working full time since June do you not understand?

I've said this a number of times, though with your train of though and memory (we'd low numbers in March and April) I can understand your difficulty in keeping thing in your head.

[Milltown Row2]

The debate we should be having is on what is the greater good but the lockdown nutters will not countenance this discussion.

I think the lockdown nutters are either extremely naive and gullible or mentally unwell. It seems that the chief medical officers and celebrity scientists have now taken over the role of parish priests and bishops in being completely infallible and having cult like following from the lockdown nutters.

You are describing poor old Sid there.

Mentally I have indeed found the last few weeks challenging given that my father was dying from hospital acquired Covid and then died from it

I think I'm doing alright considering, but still have a challenging period to navigate

You and Angelo obviously find that worthy of ridicule though - which fairly obliterates your fake "concern" for mental health, doesn't it

Sorry for your loss Sid.

I have spoken at length that the hospital transmission rates are absolutely scandalous and it is scandalous that the govt and HSE have ignored the continued warnings about the spread of Covid in hospital settings. The fact that over 50% of Covid related deaths in the south occurred in nursing homes is also scandalous.

Hospital transmission rates are a direct function of rampant community spread - and nothing else

As is the case with spread in nursing homes

Why? Because the people who work in hospitals live in the community - across the road from me, four nurses live together in the same house

Once one of them gets it, they will inadvertantly bring it into the hospital, and Covid spreads both through close contact and through the air

Hospital and nursing home patients require close contact, and they also have to breath air

And good as the sort of masks used in hospitals are, the air that staff breath out still has to go somewhere

The actual scandal is the narrative we could open up without a plan without serious outbreaks in hospitals and nursing homes occurring

That narrative was allowed to spread like wildfire

Policy in Ireland has cowed far too much to vested interests like business, who demanded opening up without having a clue what they are talking about

Public health experts and actual epidemology experts have been marginalised since last summer, and instead the government took the Homer Simpson approach

Actual policy that was proven to work was dismissed - "if something is difficult, it's not worth doing"

This has been a general failure in Europe and the west - on this theme I again encourage people to read Naomi O'Leary's Irish Times article from October 31st - she has been one of the most cogent writers about this crisis throughout
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/the-west-has-failed-us-and-europe-have-made-a-mess-of-handling-the-crisis-1.4395473

And so we all end up in a much more a difficult position - and the people that are now crying about the effects of lockdowns refuse to have the decency to face up to the fact that the position we are currently in and have had to suffer since summer is the actual result of what they were screaming for

These were political decisions by politicians who only have the ability to think in the short term

In fact if we had listened to the anti-lockdown, anti-plan crackpots like you we would be in a much, much worse position than the already very bad position we are in

The INMO do not see it that way and laid the blame solely at the feet of the HSE and govt. They said their concerns were ignored for months and month regarding PPE and distancing between beds, use of private hospitals etc. The PPE problems were still an issue up until last month.

Rapid testing was only introduced to hospitals in the south last week and that is absolutely scandalous when you look at the levels of transmission in a hospital setting. The only person I know of personally that has died from Covid was an 83 year old man who picked it up in hospital while in for blood transfusions he has to get due to some underlying health issue he has.

If the proper PPE, proper additional resources to healthcare capacity and quicker introduction of rapid testing to hospitals and care home facilities were introduced the number of deaths would have been significantly lower, irrespective of the level of infection in the community.

Over 50% alone are from nursing homes, the vulnerable people have been failed by the state and the health executive and that is the big scandal.

The common man has to suffer the implications of lockdown on their employment, their finances and their mental and physical wellbeing because those in charge messed up the handling of this crisis and where is the accountability for that?

There are a lot of If's

King of hindsight, everyone knows that the government fucked it up, everyone knows the nursing homes were under prepared and sending sick infected patients back into the nursing homes caused (still in cases) untold deaths, not that you are concerned with that, as according to your mindset, they are, on average, only going to be there for a year..

Had we had you, king of the keyboards on the job or you had the ear of anyone outside of your single bed bedroom to help in these matters we'd be in a lot better shape.

Rapid testing wasn't always available, brilliant that it is used now. PPE wasn't available as the world was looking for it, getting your hands on it at the start was difficult, by then the horse had bolted.

The borders should have been closed along with the airports at the start, I was wary of that at the time as I didn't in fairness have the hindsight of how this was going to turn out.

I reckon you smell your own shit and think it smells great

Surely rapid testing, irrespective of its reliability should have been introduced at the first stage of availability in order to minimise the risk of covid transmissions in hospital. Surely no money should have been spared to make sure all frontline staff were adequately protected with PPE, to stop infection and staff shortages. There were failings on a catastrophic levels.

Nice snide dig about people with keyboards. High ranking elected officials and high rank civil servants are paid the big money to get these decisions right, not only did they get it wrong, they got it wrong to catastrophic levels and should be held to account.

The narrative seems to be that the CMOs, health service and govt officials are above questioning on the things they have got badly wrong. They have no problem enforcing lockdowns, laying people off, shutting down business and services, restricting us from seeing our friends and loved ones but they cannot introduce regulations and provisions that would give frontline workers the adequate supports to carry out their job.

They should and hopefully will be held accountable, that's not going to solve the problems we have now!

You're talking about stuff that they were ill prepared for even though they had a plan in place to deal with it, they neither acted on the plan nor had the PPE, staff, bravery or balls to actually close the place down and kill the transmissions at the start!

No lets have Cheltenham and football and CL games going on, opened up air avenues for everyone to bring it in. How they have the cheek now to enforce the travel bans and force people into 'covid hotels' is beyond me.

Nothing you have said on this anyone will disagree with (for a change) but the horse bolted the gates stayed open and they were not prepared

It could have solved a lot of problems back then. Minimal coverage has been given to these failings, so we now have a culture where it's ok for those tasked with managing this crisis with free reign to make mistakes and not act in the public interest.

Would providing proper PPE and introducing rapid testing to hospitals a lot earlier not have served a far greater benefit to society as a whole than laying people off, shutting schools down, closing business and supports services for people with mental and physical disabilities?

Ok I'm only going to repeat myself one more time. We didn't have rapid testing at the start only recently, we also as a nation north and south were competing with the rest of the world for PPE, we'd a huge short fall as did every other country bar China!

That would have fixed the schools, hospitals, business and every topic bar the 17/18 flu you've been on!

[Ed Ricketts]

The debate we should be having is on what is the greater good but the lockdown nutters will not countenance this discussion.

I think the lockdown nutters are either extremely naive and gullible or mentally unwell. It seems that the chief medical officers and celebrity scientists have now taken over the role of parish priests and bishops in being completely infallible and having cult like following from the lockdown nutters.

Anyone who listens to that quack McConkey as a credible source is need of sectioning.

The repeated use of this kind of terminology today does not sit well with your longstanding claims of concern for those suffering from mental health problems.

[Milltown Row2]

The debate we should be having is on what is the greater good but the lockdown nutters will not countenance this discussion.

I think the lockdown nutters are either extremely naive and gullible or mentally unwell. It seems that the chief medical officers and celebrity scientists have now taken over the role of parish priests and bishops in being completely infallible and having cult like following from the lockdown nutters.

Anyone who listens to that quack McConkey as a credible source is need of sectioning.

The repeated use of this kind of terminology today does not sit well with your longstanding claims of concern for those suffering from mental health problems.

Does not give one fuvk for mental health, not one. Never in his puff posted about it on a particular thread on here either. So a WUM at full pelt

[armaghniac]

Anyone who listens to that quack McConkey as a credible source is need of sectioning.

Firstly, as others have noted, this is an inappropriate use of language.

On what date did McConkey make the forecasts you posted?
The death rate in ROI for tested cases is about 1.8%. Now we all know that there are as many untested cases again. But the point is that if the epidemic was allowed run uncontrolled then a death rate of 1%+ was a reasonable forecast as the the health service would be overwhelmed. Again 20% of people getting it is hardly far out, given the speed at which it spread at Christmas for instance.

[Angelo]

The debate we should be having is on what is the greater good but the lockdown nutters will not countenance this discussion.

I think the lockdown nutters are either extremely naive and gullible or mentally unwell. It seems that the chief medical officers and celebrity scientists have now taken over the role of parish priests and bishops in being completely infallible and having cult like following from the lockdown nutters.

You are describing poor old Sid there.

Mentally I have indeed found the last few weeks challenging given that my father was dying from hospital acquired Covid and then died from it

I think I'm doing alright considering, but still have a challenging period to navigate

You and Angelo obviously find that worthy of ridicule though - which fairly obliterates your fake "concern" for mental health, doesn't it

Sorry for your loss Sid.

I have spoken at length that the hospital transmission rates are absolutely scandalous and it is scandalous that the govt and HSE have ignored the continued warnings about the spread of Covid in hospital settings. The fact that over 50% of Covid related deaths in the south occurred in nursing homes is also scandalous.

Hospital transmission rates are a direct function of rampant community spread - and nothing else

As is the case with spread in nursing homes

Why? Because the people who work in hospitals live in the community - across the road from me, four nurses live together in the same house

Once one of them gets it, they will inadvertantly bring it into the hospital, and Covid spreads both through close contact and through the air

Hospital and nursing home patients require close contact, and they also have to breath air

And good as the sort of masks used in hospitals are, the air that staff breath out still has to go somewhere

The actual scandal is the narrative we could open up without a plan without serious outbreaks in hospitals and nursing homes occurring

That narrative was allowed to spread like wildfire

Policy in Ireland has cowed far too much to vested interests like business, who demanded opening up without having a clue what they are talking about

Public health experts and actual epidemology experts have been marginalised since last summer, and instead the government took the Homer Simpson approach

Actual policy that was proven to work was dismissed - "if something is difficult, it's not worth doing"

This has been a general failure in Europe and the west - on this theme I again encourage people to read Naomi O'Leary's Irish Times article from October 31st - she has been one of the most cogent writers about this crisis throughout
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/the-west-has-failed-us-and-europe-have-made-a-mess-of-handling-the-crisis-1.4395473

And so we all end up in a much more a difficult position - and the people that are now crying about the effects of lockdowns refuse to have the decency to face up to the fact that the position we are currently in and have had to suffer since summer is the actual result of what they were screaming for

These were political decisions by politicians who only have the ability to think in the short term

In fact if we had listened to the anti-lockdown, anti-plan crackpots like you we would be in a much, much worse position than the already very bad position we are in

The INMO do not see it that way and laid the blame solely at the feet of the HSE and govt. They said their concerns were ignored for months and month regarding PPE and distancing between beds, use of private hospitals etc. The PPE problems were still an issue up until last month.

Rapid testing was only introduced to hospitals in the south last week and that is absolutely scandalous when you look at the levels of transmission in a hospital setting. The only person I know of personally that has died from Covid was an 83 year old man who picked it up in hospital while in for blood transfusions he has to get due to some underlying health issue he has.

If the proper PPE, proper additional resources to healthcare capacity and quicker introduction of rapid testing to hospitals and care home facilities were introduced the number of deaths would have been significantly lower, irrespective of the level of infection in the community.

Over 50% alone are from nursing homes, the vulnerable people have been failed by the state and the health executive and that is the big scandal.

The common man has to suffer the implications of lockdown on their employment, their finances and their mental and physical wellbeing because those in charge messed up the handling of this crisis and where is the accountability for that?

There are a lot of If's

King of hindsight, everyone knows that the government fucked it up, everyone knows the nursing homes were under prepared and sending sick infected patients back into the nursing homes caused (still in cases) untold deaths, not that you are concerned with that, as according to your mindset, they are, on average, only going to be there for a year..

Had we had you, king of the keyboards on the job or you had the ear of anyone outside of your single bed bedroom to help in these matters we'd be in a lot better shape.

Rapid testing wasn't always available, brilliant that it is used now. PPE wasn't available as the world was looking for it, getting your hands on it at the start was difficult, by then the horse had bolted.

The borders should have been closed along with the airports at the start, I was wary of that at the time as I didn't in fairness have the hindsight of how this was going to turn out.

I reckon you smell your own shit and think it smells great

Surely rapid testing, irrespective of its reliability should have been introduced at the first stage of availability in order to minimise the risk of covid transmissions in hospital. Surely no money should have been spared to make sure all frontline staff were adequately protected with PPE, to stop infection and staff shortages. There were failings on a catastrophic levels.

Nice snide dig about people with keyboards. High ranking elected officials and high rank civil servants are paid the big money to get these decisions right, not only did they get it wrong, they got it wrong to catastrophic levels and should be held to account.

The narrative seems to be that the CMOs, health service and govt officials are above questioning on the things they have got badly wrong. They have no problem enforcing lockdowns, laying people off, shutting down business and services, restricting us from seeing our friends and loved ones but they cannot introduce regulations and provisions that would give frontline workers the adequate supports to carry out their job.

They should and hopefully will be held accountable, that's not going to solve the problems we have now!

You're talking about stuff that they were ill prepared for even though they had a plan in place to deal with it, they neither acted on the plan nor had the PPE, staff, bravery or balls to actually close the place down and kill the transmissions at the start!

No lets have Cheltenham and football and CL games going on, opened up air avenues for everyone to bring it in. How they have the cheek now to enforce the travel bans and force people into 'covid hotels' is beyond me.

Nothing you have said on this anyone will disagree with (for a change) but the horse bolted the gates stayed open and they were not prepared

It could have solved a lot of problems back then. Minimal coverage has been given to these failings, so we now have a culture where it's ok for those tasked with managing this crisis with free reign to make mistakes and not act in the public interest.

Would providing proper PPE and introducing rapid testing to hospitals a lot earlier not have served a far greater benefit to society as a whole than laying people off, shutting schools down, closing business and supports services for people with mental and physical disabilities?

Ok I'm only going to repeat myself one more time. We didn't have rapid testing at the start only recently, we also as a nation north and south were competing with the rest of the world for PPE, we'd a huge short fall as did every other country bar China!

That would have fixed the schools, hospitals, business and every topic bar the 17/18 flu you've been on!

Rapid testing has been available for months, long before the Christmas surge. We know of the high transmission rates in hospitals. Lack of PPE and lack of testing of patients admitted and staff starting shifts would almost certainly have reduced transmission and as a result, deaths.

[Angelo]

Anyone who listens to that quack McConkey as a credible source is need of sectioning.

Firstly, as others have noted, this is an inappropriate use of language.

On what date did McConkey make the forecasts you posted?
The death rate in ROI for tested cases is about 1.8%. Now we all know that there are as many untested cases again. But the point is that if the epidemic was allowed run uncontrolled then a death rate of 1%+ was a reasonable forecast as the the health service would be overwhelmed. Again 20% of people getting it is hardly far out, given the speed at which it spread at Christmas for instance.

Why did you decide to edit out the article that contained him overestimating deaths by about 4,000%?

He has zero credibility on this, he has been wrong on about every proclamation he has made. How he still gets a platform to drive his dose of fear on national media is incredible.

[sid waddell]

In November 2019 road safety expert Danny McClutch reacted to the All Knowing Internet Expert Party™'s "ROAD FREEDOM" proposals to allow unlimited drink driving and brakeless cars, abolish speed limits and ban seat belts by predicting that passing the proposals into legislation would result in a massive increase in road deaths, possibly thousands

The proposals were rejected outright by lawmakers and current road safety laws retained

In January 2021, spokesman for the All Knowing Internet Expert Party™ Fulvio Gobshitio pointed to the reduced number of road deaths for 2020, achieved under the retained road safety laws, as "conclusive evidence that our proposals need to be implemented now", and slammed McClutch as "a fool, a scaremongerer, mentally ill - just look at the 2020 stats which CONCLUSIVELY back up the need for "ROAD FREEDOM""

Gobshitio then claimed that the All Knowing Internet Expert™ Party were being silenced by the "PC brigade"

[Itchy]

Anyone who listens to that quack McConkey as a credible source is need of sectioning.

Firstly, as others have noted, this is an inappropriate use of language.

On what date did McConkey make the forecasts you posted?
The death rate in ROI for tested cases is about 1.8%. Now we all know that there are as many untested cases again. But the point is that if the epidemic was allowed run uncontrolled then a death rate of 1%+ was a reasonable forecast as the the health service would be overwhelmed. Again 20% of people getting it is hardly far out, given the speed at which it spread at Christmas for instance.

Why did you decide to edit out the article that contained him overestimating deaths by about 4,000%?

He has zero credibility on this, he has been wrong on about every proclamation he has made. How he still gets a platform to drive his dose of fear on national media is incredible.

Angelo, I completely agree with you on McConkey. He should be kept off the airways. Everything he has said has proven to be bullshit. How he is never challenged by anyone on the media on his false predictions I dont know. The other day on Matt Cooper was an embarassment for Irish Journalism, letting him spout utter bullshit unchallenged. I also have a big problem with Holohan who is trying to reinvent himself after the cervical smear debacle. These guys are loving the limelight. What should be happening is that they give their advice to government behind closed doors, government weighs it up with all the other advice (mental health, children welfare, job losses etc) and then makes the best appropriate decision. Instead these NPHET people have been allowed to effectively run the country by media. Its incredible. And I am not a COVID denier, its a dangerous disease but my issue is there is no evident balance at the moment.

[seafoid]

 5,200 Irish people return from holidays abroad in one week

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/government-concern-as-5-200-irish-people-return-from-holidays-abroad-in-one-week-1.4481242

[Milltown Row2]

5,200 Irish people return from holidays abroad in one week

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/government-concern-as-5-200-irish-people-return-from-holidays-abroad-in-one-week-1.4481242

Hopefully they'll follow guidelines and quarantine for 2 weeks.......

[Rossfan]

Anyone who listens to that quack McConkey as a credible source is need of sectioning.

Firstly, as others have noted, this is an inappropriate use of language.

On what date did McConkey make the forecasts you posted?
The death rate in ROI for tested cases is about 1.8%. Now we all know that there are as many untested cases again. But the point is that if the epidemic was allowed run uncontrolled then a death rate of 1%+ was a reasonable forecast as the the health service would be overwhelmed. Again 20% of people getting it is hardly far out, given the speed at which it spread at Christmas for instance.

Why did you decide to edit out the article that contained him overestimating deaths by about 4,000%?

He has zero credibility on this, he has been wrong on about every proclamation he has made. How he still gets a platform to drive his dose of fear on national media is incredible.

Angelo, I completely agree with you on McConkey. He should be kept off the airways. Everything he has said has proven to be bullshit. How he is never challenged by anyone on the media on his false predictions I dont know. The other day on Matt Cooper was an embarassment for Irish Journalism, letting him spout utter bullshit unchallenged. I also have a big problem with Holohan who is trying to reinvent himself after the cervical smear debacle. These guys are loving the limelight. What should be happening is that they give their advice to government behind closed doors, government weighs it up with all the other advice (mental health, children welfare, job losses etc) and then makes the best appropriate decision. Instead these NPHET people have been allowed to effectively run the country by media. Its incredible. And I am not a COVID denier, its a dangerous disease but my issue is there is no evident balance at the moment.

I'm not racist but......