Can we have some fcuking control on the airports from high risk countries please?

mandrake04

tobefrank321 wrote: »

In Aus and NZ, people just accept the quarantine condition and get on with it. Yes its annoying but if you want to do there, you have to do it.

Accept it? People here love it because they see the other option is living like a rat scurrying from hole to hole for months on end, Melbourne got a taste of this and thankfully the rest of us watched it on TV and said No Thanks!!

We have seen that living with covid has failed around the world, living without covid is the only other option sure you get the odd case pop up but you knock it on the head in a few days for a country of 25m and you 14 day average is 0.7 cases (0.0028 per 100,000) it’s not too shabby.

Morrison said last March this would 18 months maybe 2 years, no way could we have survived being closed that length of time. In Sydney we had a taste of that last April/May and part of June and although it was enough tame compared to what my folks and friends in Ireland were doing ...eh No Thanks!!

yasmina

tobefrank321 wrote: »

Have the quarantine hotels actually opened yet?

Is there any further clarity on this?
Are they open? When will they open? Will all passengers from all countries on the list be required to go into hotel quarantine or will some be allowed to quarantine at home ?
Grateful for any references as struggling to get factual information.

Danno

Tenzor07 wrote: »

Pulling up the drawbridge before the Virus became endemic last Spring would have been the best approach.

First sensible thing you've contributed to this discussion.

Better late than never.

Cosmo Kramer

fly_agaric wrote: »

It looks like they just decided it was politically impossible (as you've said), did no work and are now in somewhat of a spin trying to sort out how to go about it on the fly for limited subgroups of incomers at least.

To be honest I think they're only introducing hotel quarantine to try to get people off the subject and back to focussing on sticking to the lockdown rules. They know full well it's a complete waste of time, but there has been so much noise about it that politically they have to be seen to do something. So they're bringing it in for a list of countries that next to nobody is coming in from anyway. I'd be surprised if they needed more than one hotel for the amount of people coming from those countries. Somewhere like the Maldron at the airport will do the job.

gozunda

Cosmo Kramer wrote: »

To be honest I think they're only introducing hotel quarantine to try to get people off the subject and back to focussing on sticking to the lockdown rules. They know full well it's a complete waste of time, but there has been so much noise about it that politically they have to be seen to do something. So they're bringing it in for a list of countries that next to nobody is coming in from anyway. I'd be surprised if they needed more than one hotel for the amount of people coming from those countries. Somewhere like the Maldron at the airport will do the job.

It appears that these measures are being introduced to align with the CTA between ourselves and the UK

Currently Quarantine hotels are being set up in the UK, it has been announced. And from Monday 15th February, arrivals from the countries on the UK government’s 'red list' - (33 'high risk' countries) - will face mandatory hotel quarantine for 10 days, costing each traveller £1,750

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2021/02/09/all-uk-arrivals-face-10-000-fine-and-10-year-prison-sentence-for-breaking-new-quarantine-r

We've had a developing situation where UK residents were attempting to dodge UK travel restrictions by coming here and then flying to a number of those countries and vice versa. And something had to be done to put a break on the "I'm going on my holiers to Dubai or similar and fek everyone else" brigade from both countries

https://www.joe.ie/news/british-ex-pats-using-short-stays-ireland-get-around-covid-travel-bans-715152

fly_agaric

Cosmo Kramer wrote: »

To be honest I think they're only introducing hotel quarantine to try to get people off the subject and back to focussing on sticking to the lockdown rules.

It is more that that. Travel is raising its head as an issue in other countries in Europe also (see above about UK, and French deciding all hauliers coming from Ireland need at least a sort of simple/quick Coronavirus test done before they'll let them in).

Cosmo Kramer wrote: »

They know full well it's a complete waste of time, but there has been so much noise about it that politically they have to be seen to do something. So they're bringing it in for a list of countries that next to nobody is coming in from anyway. I'd be surprised if they needed more than one hotel for the amount of people coming from those countries. Somewhere like the Maldron at the airport will do the job.

As you know I don't think it is a waste of time and I also believe we will see it happen on a wider basis eventually (later this year?) if vaccination does not get us out of the hole.
You can't operate a society the way we are now and no country (not even the US) seems to have been able or willing to carry on through the disease + live with it so only other option appears to be to supress it. That will involve strict controls on incoming travel while disease is out of control in other countries.

On quarantining a subset arriving from countries with large numbers of cases of newer variants that are more transmissible or against which the current vaccines may be less effective, I thought NPHET had advised them to do this? The numbers may be very small compared to other locations people come to Ireland from, but it is not "nobody" (and next to it is not good enough). If it was there'd be no problem!

MOH

Banana Republic 1 wrote: »

A zero tolerance for covid is the only method proven to work. Would you live with a house fire or tolerate rats in your kitchen.

Please cite a reference of a country with a land border in which it's worked. If there's burning rats running through a hole in your wall you're going to end up with a flaming kitchen full of them.

Zero covid is a nonsense idea for this country, but the border is still a red herring as far as implementing restrictions goes..
If we're going to use spurious analogies, you can keep a leaky boat from sinking by bailing it out. Your feet aren't going to be try, there's still going to be a fair bit of water getting into the boat, but at least the whole thing isn't going to go under.

There's been an strong reluctance on the government's part to implement any kind of travel restrictions, and now they're finally being forced into it they're throwing out every excuse and distraction they can think of, most of which are nonsense:
- it's no good because the border: 80%+ of arrivals onto the island arrive at airports in the republic. You'll still get cases coming in over the border, but so what. You'll be controlling those 80% of incoming cases, as opposed to 0%. Not everyone follows exisitng restrictions, we don't just go "oh well, might as well bin them so"
- we can't bring in travel restrictions because it will be very hard to get rid of them: pure nonsense there from Leo
- we can't bring in quarantine because we need to examine the legal implications: so even after 50%+ of our cases in autumn were a new strain that emerged in Spain over the summer, nobody in authority thought "what if there's another new strain that's far more contagious/deadly? maybe we'd better have a contingency plan for restricting travel, and have a look at what would be needed for that"
- oh hang on, we couldn't, because the government didn't know that Covid could mutate. Another gem from Leo, who's somehow become even less credible than Trump.

So instead of having a contingency plan in place, and implementing it, like a competent government, they've fallen back on the old reliable of blaming and shaming the general public. Which the media are only too happy to go along with instead of asking any probing question. Or even any questions at all.
And instead of restricting inbound travel, they've shifted the focus to outbound travel, which will do absolutely nothing to help. I could understand it if they actually had a quarantine system in place, and wanted to avoid it being overwhelmed by returning holidaymakers. Or even if they fined inbound passengers if they couldn't show that their journey was necessary. But fining people outbound is highly disturbing.

It says everything that they're far quicker to give a regular breakdown of how many people return to the country every day are Irish, than they were to give regular figures on the number of people vaccinated.
I'd be curious as to how many people being harangued at Dublin airport over the past week or two were already abroad before the fatwa on holiday was introduced.

Plus I must have missed the bit where they guaranteed prompt refunds for anyone who cancelled their holiday. Which if it was a coherent plan as opposed to a knee-jerk panic reaction would have been an obvious way to get buy-in from people being asked to cancel months-planned holiday at the last second.

BiggJim

The airport was not what I'd call quiet when I was coming in it in January.

SheepsClothing

MOH wrote: »

Please cite a reference of a country with a land border in which it's worked.

Vietnam - Has four land borders, including one with China. Imports goods by lorry. Zero Covid, zero excuses.

Tenzor07

MOH wrote: »

Please cite a reference of a country with a land border in which it's worked. If there's burning rats running through a hole in your wall you're going to end up with a flaming kitchen full of them..

That was a good reply to a snipey off the cuff comment, well done you thought that response through...!

Tenzor07

SheepsClothing wrote: »

Vietnam - Has four land borders, including one with China. Imports goods by lorry. Zero Covid, zero excuses.

One problem with your statement....

.... We're NOT Vietnam!!

SheepsClothing

Tenzor07 wrote: »

One problem with your statement....

.... We're NOT Vietnam!!

But we can be. Believe.

Tenzor07

BiggJim wrote: »

The airport was not what I'd call quiet when I was coming in it in January.

Which year was that? 2020?

SheepsClothing

SheepsClothing wrote: »

Vietnam - Has four land borders, including one with China. Imports goods by lorry. Zero Covid, zero excuses.

Vietnam? Seriously?

Tenzor07

SheepsClothing wrote: »

But we can be. Believe.

Yea I'd luv to be ruled by a single party government with a military that will take to the streets and make sure you didn't leave you home.. or else...

Ah.. at least you didn't say NZ...

MOH

The other genius aspect of the government keeping the media and public focused on the mandatory quarantine shenaningans and holiday shaming is that it has successfully distracted everyone from the other massive government failing. The other key element of Zero covid which we actually could successfully implement were it not for incompetence.

Almost a year into this and we still don't have a proper contact tracing system. Something that's been recommend form day one by the WHO as one of the most important elements in restricting covid. And the one commonality between isolated countries that have gone the "zero covid" route, and others which haven't had as severe restrictions yet still managed to keep cases relatively low.

Cillian de Gascun told us all in July that we had a proper infrastructure in place, that we could swiftly identify clusters, trace close contacts and isolate them. Then Philip Nolan accidentally let slip in September that this was a complete lie, that we were only tracing contacts for the previous 48 hours, and that any more that that was "academic".

I admit I'm not a virologist, but unless I'm missing something it seems fairly obvious that for a virus that typically takes 2-5 days to show symptoms, if you're only going back 48 hours from when someone starts feeling unwell then in most cases you're going to fail to identify where and how an individual contracted the virus. Which means you've also missed tracing who else was infected by the same source. Buy hey, that's just academic, right Phil?

They finally announced they were going to start looking back further in December, but then they stopped contract tracing altogether, and there seems to be zero information since they resumed as to whether that's doing it properly or the 48-hour nonsense.

But there isn't much point implementing mandatory quarantines if you're not also doing the single most effective thing to help curb the spread of the virus.

SheepsClothing

Deleted User wrote: »

Vietnam? Seriously?

Yes. New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Finland also. Hopefully Ireland soon.

Tenzor07

MOH wrote: »

But there isn't much point implementing mandatory quarantines if you're not also doing the single most effective thing to help curb the spread of the virus.

The plan Leaky&Mehole have is to keep the public distracted until they can muddle through the vaccine rollout, all but shutting down the entry points to the state will give the public enough to chew on until then...
They're probably also hoping that there will be an election this time next year so they can leave the rebuilding of the destruction to the state that their policies have caused and let Sinn Fein and Labour rebuild the decimated Aviation&tourism sectors..

SheepsClothing

SheepsClothing wrote: »

Yes. New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Finland also. Hopefully Ireland soon.

.....aaaaand round we go again

faceman

SheepsClothing wrote: »

Yes. New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Finland also. Hopefully Ireland soon.

Finland? You sure about that?

SheepsClothing

faceman wrote: »

Finland? You sure about that?

Yes. They have pursued a maximum suppression strategy to great success.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/finland/

From the Department of Foreign Affairs:

https://www.dfa.ie/travel/travel-advice/a-z-list-of-countries/finland/

"There are significant restrictions on inward travel to Finland from most countries, including Ireland. Entry to Finland is limited to certain categories of passengers. This includes Finnish citizens and residents of Finland, and a small number of passengers travelling for essential reasons."

SheepsClothing

SheepsClothing wrote: »

Yes. They have pursued a maximum suppression strategy to great success.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/finland/

From the Department of Foreign Affairs:

https://www.dfa.ie/travel/travel-advice/a-z-list-of-countries/finland/

"There are significant restrictions on inward travel to Finland from most countries, including Ireland. Entry to Finland is limited to certain categories of passengers. This includes Finnish citizens and residents of Finland, and a small number of passengers travelling for essential reasons."

Residents can enter freely and there is only self isolation. There are many places like that. There is no mandatory quarantine

Its actually the exact same entry requirements as the USA

UDAWINNER

SheepsClothing wrote: »

Vietnam - Has four land borders, including one with China. Imports goods by lorry. Zero Covid, zero excuses.

its a basket case with complete lockdown, numerous articles showing it's riidled with it

MOH

SheepsClothing wrote: »

Vietnam - Has four land borders, including one with China. Imports goods by lorry. Zero Covid, zero excuses.

Uhhhhh... they've had nearly 500 new cases this month. That's not zero.

SheepsClothing wrote: »

Yes. New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Finland also. Hopefully Ireland soon.

Finland?! Finland had nearly 400 cases yesterday and 2000 in the past week!

Cosmo Kramer

Vietnam! Dear God. Might as well suggest North Korea while you're at it.

SheepsClothing wrote: »

Yes. New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Finland also. Hopefully Ireland soon.

Island state, island state, island state, city state and Finland is not remotely Covid free.

None of those are remotely comparable to Ireland. Next.

I see Gavan Reilly is stirring up nonsense again this morning about people booking dental appointments in Tenerife. He's basically a spokesman for the opposition parties in government these days.

Totally agree with the poster who flagged up the government's failure on contact tracing though. If only the media were putting as much focus on that as they are on creating hysteria about overseas travel we might actually make some progress with this situation.

gozunda

Cosmo Kramer wrote: »

Vietnam! Dear God. Might as well suggest North Korea while you're at it.Island state, island state, island state, city state and Finland is not remotely Covid free. None of those are remotely comparable to Ireland. Next.I see Gavan Reilly is stirring up nonsense again this morning about people booking dental appointments in Tenerife. He's basically a spokesman for the opposition parties in government these days. Totally agree with the poster who flagged up the government's failure on contact tracing though. If only the media were putting as much focus on that as they are on creating hysteria about overseas travel we might actually make some progress with this situation.

None of them have to be 'comparable' to Ireland.

God forbid "we" should even consider a range of measures that just might get our rate of infection down - keep it down - and deal with deniers insisting that they - must - absolutely must have their holidays in Porto del Portaloo for their annual dose of sea, sun, sangria and the squits.

Afaik the media is reporting on what is happening atm - and at present that's gob****es booking holidays - sorry! I mean arranging dental treatment in Tenerife.

And yup plenty of media stories on contract tracing. Reporting on both is not mutually exclusive. But I guess the media didn't consult some on that. Their bad.

:rolleyes:

gozunda

gozunda wrote: »

None of them have to be 'comparable' to Ireland.

God forbid we should even consider a range of measures that just might get our rate of infection down - keep it down - and deal with deniers insisting that they - must - absolutely must have their holidays in Porto del Portaloo for their annual dose of sea, sun, sangria and the squits.

Afaik the media is reporting on what is happening atm - and at present that's gob****es booking holidays - sorry! I mean arranging dental treatment in Tenerife.

And yup plenty of media stories on contract tracing. Reporting on both is not mutually exclusive. But I guess the media didn't consult some on that. Their bad.

:rolleyes:

And in that post we see the evidence we need of how successful the media and government have been in persuading the gullible that ALL travel is for holidays in Lanzarote and Tenerife

gozunda

[Deleted User] wrote: »

And in that post we see the evidence we need of how successful the media and government have been in persuading the gullible that ALL travel is for holidays in Lanzarote and Tenerife

Do "we"?

Nope. Didn't mention 'Lanzarote' there btw. Simply replying to previous comment referencing ' Tenerife'. "Porto del Portaloo" is fictitious btw

But yeah its all a big government / media conspiracy :pac:

gozunda

gozunda wrote: »

But yeah its all a big government / media conspiracy :pac:

yes, its big government / media deflection

And some people buy into it, hook, line and sinker

faceman

gozunda wrote: »

None of them have to be 'comparable' to Ireland.

God forbid we should even consider a range of measures that just might get our rate of infection down - keep it down - and deal with deniers insisting that they - must - absolutely must have their holidays in Porto del Portaloo for their annual dose of sea, sun, sangria and the squits.

Afaik the media is reporting on what is happening atm - and at present that's gob****es booking holidays - sorry! I mean arranging dental treatment in Tenerife.

And yup plenty of media stories on contract tracing. Reporting on both is not mutually exclusive. But I guess the media didn't consult some on that. Their bad.

:rolleyes:

There are times I do think you are a genius and there are times I think you're trolling us

You're absolutely correct about mutual exclusion, this is something infectious disease experts have been talking about. They've also been flagging proportionality. You'd be hard pressed to find an infection disease expert who would be clapping at RTE chasing dentists in Tenerife (The dentist Claire Byrne spoke with today made reference to 2 Irish bookings). That's hardly a national crisis, even if those bookings aren't legimate. (And if they're not fcuk those people who did it)

We have wider issues with treatment of confirmed cases and close contacts. The so called "black market" economy at present of builders and house dressers etc doing house calls. Lets be honest, the more we shine the spotlight on ourselves, the uglier we look in the light. No one wants to talk about mandatory quarantine of close contacts and confirmed cases because it effects everyone whether they like it or not.