What if we had continued as normal?

hi!

JDD wrote: »

This is something I have been wondering about. We all saw the overflowing hospitals in Italy and Spain, and the general consensus was that it was going to be an unmitigated disaster in the US due to the structure of their healthcare system. What happened in Italy and Spain was the central reason for our very strict lockdown.

Certainly, it looked like this was the right conclusion when coronavirus hit New York, but even then the situation wasn't as bad as it was in Bergamo or Madrid a few weeks earlier. Now we have it spread to Texas and Florida and California, and despite the numbers being diagnosed there doesn't appear to be overflowing hospitals, doctors deciding who gets a ventilator and who is too far gone, no further pictures of refridgered trucks outside hospitals, or the army bringing bodies to crematoriums.

In fact, despite the numbers being diagnosed, deaths are nowhere near what they were in April and May in the US. While clearly they are increasing, not at the rate they did in early April. So I guess we will see what the outcome is. Yes, they have definitely had way more deaths to date than they would have had if they had imposed a full lockdown. But there is some reason to believe that in two or three years, they might have had less deaths than other countries that swung from full lockdown to half reopening to full lockdown. Certainly they may be picking up on cancers earlier. The rate of suicide goes up at the same time as the rate of unemployment goes up - it was estimated in Ireland that there were between 300 and 500 additional suicides when the unemployment rate went from 4.5% to 8.5% in the earlier part of the recession. Clearly the suicide numbers will be less than the additional deaths from covid, and probably the numbers ultimately dying from undiagnosed cancer, but when you add all the "avoidable" deaths that will have resulted from lockdown, there may not be a huge difference between that and those who would have died from covid if it had been left run free.

What this will all come down to is the vaccine. If we get a working vaccine in H1 2021, then the lockdowns will have been worth it. If we don't, then those who let the virus run free may come out of it in a better position than the rest of us.

Yes because hospitals around the world saw what was happening in Italy and prepared. Italy were blindsided. The health service literally changed overnight to prepare.
And there have been hospitals overflowing in America eg Florida,Texas - I’m a nurse and active in fb groups for same. Nurse and doctors have been overwhelmed there too.

Charles Babbage

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

In the long-term, between increases in deaths due to cancer, mental health etc the difference will be narrow between doing nothing and what we did do.
Covid isn't the deadly killer we were told it was back in February and all perspective on the big picture has been lost in favour of trying to eliminate covid

If we had not acted then the health service would have imploded entirely and we would have even more deaths from cancer also. You hardly need a PhD in pubic health to work this out.

Spiderman0081

mariaalice wrote: »

Fear would have stopped people going to work as it would have been everywhere, so accesses to food would have become scrappy shops would open hit and miss even garages, widespread hoarding of food, the civil defense, and the army would have had to be back up the Garda. The very vulnerable who could not leave their house in those situations would have food parcels thrown at their front door every now and then by the civil defense.

Hospitals would have become a scary place so lots of unscheduled home berth and people who really need a hospital staying at home. Doctors and nurses in full PPE would be given Garda escorts to work and prioritised for fule along with anyone maintaining power and water.

Mostly we would have been grand but it would be a very scary place until we got something sorted.

This is exactly what happened in Sweden. Trust me. I live there

YellowBucket

There's a major problem in the USA, and with some degree of bleed-over to Ireland through social media, where people are just picking their own facts and reality and burying their heads in the sand about this. Unfortunately we aren't going to be able to just reset the clock to 2019 and everything will be fine.

If we had just ignored it and continued with business as usual, we would have created a frightening situation where people were getting very sick and dying and that would cause mass panic and kill the economy anyway. There's a fine balancing act going on to maintain life as normal while not risking a dramatic outbreak and that's probably going to have be part how things are until we have a technical solution to this blasted virus, which will be both vaccines and medical treatments, and it's quite possible that the medical treatment aspect will play a more important role in the short to medium term than the vaccine.

The reality of it is we've lived through a relatively golden age of very few dangerous and highly contagious diseases. Really since the 1950s we've been living a somewhat charmed life where vaccines had eliminated almost all of the really nasty diseases and the ones that remained were relatively difficult to catch or have been highly treatable. Even HIV despite its horrendous initial days is now something we can treat effectively and even at its peak it was fairly hard to catch other than through direct fluid-to-fluid contact. This thing is transmitted by talking and breathing in the same room, which is quite a different situation, and more like the TB and Polio era.

The fact that it's an unpleasant reality is just a fact. We're going to have to just be pragmatic, deal with it and muddle through until we have technical solutions and frankly turning it into an insane populist garbage fest as a significant percentage of Americans have done is completely counterproductive nonsense and it's something we could do without importing.

All people are being asked to do is wear a feckin' surgical mask or similar barrier to prevent risk of spread of a rather nasty virus. It's hardly that big an imposition and if people want to turn it into some kind of conspiracy theory lunacy, I don't really think there's much anyone can say in response other than they really need to get a sense of perspective and get a grip on reality.

It's crap. It's frustrating. It's annoying. However, that's biology and life in general. We need to just get on with dealing with this and in a couple of years it will hopefully be just a story to tell the grandkids and a rather dramatic episode of Reeling in the Years.

Atlantic Dawn

Before we go congratulating ourselves for our approach we should scale in to the lives saved those people who have missed out on cancer testing and other treatments to make room for Covid. Majority of these people are many decades off their life expectancy unlike those that died from Covid.

OMM 0000

Look at places like Hong Kong where the locals have a sense of responsibility and doing what's best for the community. So everyone wears masks and they never shut down. People still go to work, go out to restaurants, etc. As a result they have had barely any deaths.

Unfortunately they recently made the mistake of allowing people who work on planes and boats to have free access to the country (no quarantine or testing required) which has spread a bit of the virus, but they've realised that was a mistake and things are getting under control again.

The Hong Kong model is the correct one - don't destroy your economy, everyone wears masks, and take some temporary actions (such as closing pubs at night) whenever there is a flare up of cases in the community.

I don't think this sort of thing could work in Ireland though, as there's too many selfish people and too many scumbags. You need to have a law abiding population for it to work.

CalamariFritti

We knew this virus was going to kill people. Even with the best of medical attention some were going to die.
So the plan was to flatten the curve. So that chaos in an overwhelmed health service wouldn't create extra deaths on top of those that seemed inevitable.

I think that was and still is valid and it ultimately succeeded. Had we not slowed it down an overwhelmed health service would have had to triage and we would have lost more lives.

But now we seem to have changed tac. Now it seems every corona death must be prevented at all costs.

YellowBucket

Atlantic Dawn wrote: »

Before we go congratulating ourselves for our approach we should scale in to the lives saved those people who have missed out on cancer testing and other treatments to make room for Covid. Majority of these people are many decades off their life expectancy unlike those that died from Covid.

That's also an issue that needs to be dealt with properly and has to work within the backdrop of a viral outbreak. It's a tragic mess and there's no perfect solutions either.

If you look at the outbreaks that happened in healthcare environments they were far from non-serious and there's been a hell of a lot learned and approaches have adapted over the last 6 months.

Clearing those backlogs is essential and a big part of that will be ensuring that people don't go around spreading the virus and placing excess load on the healthcare system this autumn or we'll be back to a situation where it can't cope with everything that's being thrown at it and inevitably the knock-on impacts of that are other things go untreated end up in queues.

There's a finite resource in any healthcare system and as a population and business community (points at meat sector) we need to ensure we aren't dumping risk into the health system that it doesn't need.

Every time someone goes "ah feck this it's grand!" be they a member of the public or some manager in a plant, and if someone ends up getting COVID-19 that's resources pulled straight out of other aspects of the healthcare system and someone added to a queue somewhere, even if nobody dies as a direct result of it, someone's chances are being reduced.

Also some of those put at most risk were the people who had to treat COVID-19 patents in the front lines of healthcare, yet some seem to not give a toss about that. It's all been 'feck the masks!' or 'how dare ya take time off to self isolate, I've a business to run!"

CalamariFritti

OMM 0000 wrote: »

Look at places like Hong Kong where the locals have a sense of responsibility and doing what's best for the community. So everyone wears masks and they never shut down. People still go to work, go out to restaurants, etc. As a result they have had barely any deaths.

Unfortunately they recently made the mistake of allowing people who work on planes and boats to have free access to the country (no quarantine or testing required) which has spread a bit of the virus, but they've realised that was a mistake and things are getting under control again.

The Hong Kong model is the correct one - don't destroy your economy, everyone wears masks, and take some temporary actions (such as closing pubs at night) whenever there is a flare up of cases in the community.

I don't think this sort of thing could work in Ireland though, as there's too many selfish people and too many scumbags. You need to have a law abiding population for it to work.

In your opinion. Whether thats true or not remains to be seen. The fat lady isn't even warming up yet.
And would you trade living in a totalitarian regime for a brief COVID success? I wouldnt.

ShooterSF

mr_fegelien wrote: »

Let's say when at the start of this year, the world saw the news about the coronavirus in Wuhan but world governments refused to close down and operated as normal. Where would we be now?

Would we have achieved herd immunity? Would the economic and mental health damage be less for the time being and in years to come? I'm not sure I agree that lockdown was a good idea?

Are you asking if you are sure or?
"I'm Ron Burgundy?" :pac::pac:

Tenzor07

bilston wrote: »

The thing is that while Sweden has done worse than most, it has still fared better than some European countries. No surprise in some like the UK, Spain and Italy for various reasons...however Belgium is a curious example. Sweden has fared much better than Belgium who had a stricter lockdown from a pretty early stage as well. Some of this might be down to luck, or there are ethnic and demographic factors at play.

Well, Anders Tegnell did say come back in 1 year and ask who took the better approach...

The truth is that all European and American health and political systems were almost completely blindsided by this back in the earlier part of the year, they heard of alerts from China back in December/January however the HSE still weren't restricting care home access and the Govt. weren't banning flights from/to Italy months later..
Only now they are still scrambling to find a way to deal with it, fumbling around with the meat processors in the midlands after the HSE had said they wouldn't go near it, opening contact tracing call centres and putting passenger tracing forms online only late into August and almost 6 months after the start of the crisis. Only now making face coverings mandatory...

The Irish HSE/Govt. response could best be described as them at the controls of an aircraft trying to learn how to fly it when it's heading nose first for the ground and a number of the passengers have already died due to shock, now they are handing out parachutes to the rest.

Now going into the Autumn/Winter season after School kids being kept at home for 6 months and everyone staying indoors it is almost sure to see massive spikes in cases as kids come home after mixing at schools and we see households having to isolate for 2 weeks. Which then has a knock on effect for the households of essential workers or those who can't work from home still.
The traditional flu season will see people panicking as they don't know if it's covid or flu, overwhelming GP's and testing centres.

This all stems from the Hse/Govt. response of the slowest easing of restrictions in Europe, pushing out allowing social contact until the Winter and lead to wider lockdowns sending the economy into double quarter recessions and more borrowing...

OMM 0000

CalamariFritti wrote: »

In your opinion. Whether thats true or not remains to be seen. The fat lady isn't even warming up yet.
And would you trade living in a totalitarian regime for a brief COVID success? I wouldnt.

I'm not stating my opinion, I'm stating facts. The data is available.

Hong Kong isn't a totalitarian regime, and bringing up this point is completely irrelevant.

Replace Hong Kong with South Korea and you have a similar result.

dwayneshintzy

CalamariFritti wrote: »

In your opinion. Whether thats true or not remains to be seen. The fat lady isn't even warming up yet.
And would you trade living in a totalitarian regime for a brief COVID success? I wouldnt.

Totalitarian measures were not put in place in HK to deal with covid-19.

CalamariFritti

OMM 0000 wrote: »

I'm not stating my opinion, I'm stating facts. The data is available.

Hong Kong isn't a totalitarian regime, and bringing up this point is completely irrelevant.

Replace Hong Kong with South Korea and you have a similar result.

Ok, I agree with most of that, there are other examples. Japan seems to have done the same with success. But you're effectively suppressing and locking the virus out. Why I'm saying lets wait and see is because it may still turn out that thats just prolonging the inevitable. Or else live masked up and with other restrictions for ever and ever.

YellowBucket

The fundamental reality of it is that some countries may simply not be able to deal with it and will just flounder until there's a vaccine. I think the US is in that category as it quite literally does not have the political capital or leadership ability anymore to cope. Even in normal times, the US was hitting full government shut downs over inability to find working consensus on a whole range of issues and it's been off the scale entirely in the last few years.

In more normal political times, I think the US would have coped be it under Democratic or Republican leadership. What's going on right now is really very bizarre stuff.

A lot of European countries are somewhere in the middle on that. They've fared a bit bitter, but there's still a lot of nonsense bubbling up here and there and there's bleed-over of conspiracy theories and discourse generally between most countries.

It's not about totalitarian regimes vs liberal regimes, but rather about public buy in to deal with a crisis.

Bit cynical

We would have always had to have some sort of shutdown initially just to get things organised and make some sort of a plan. During this time the questions would have been concerning the extent to which hospital and ICU capacity could be expanded and what what level of infections could be coped with.

I think we went from "flattening the curve" to a sort of eradication strategy where getting cases down to close to zero as quickly as possible became the priority. This would make a lot of sense if we were New Zealand where the whole country can be isolated once cases are eliminated but may prove to be a mistake in our case. We did quite well with this. Having had quite high deaths, we managed to bring it down to the extent that we had no reported deaths for a period of about 10 days. However, with all eradication strategies, once you have the numbers down, then what? Unless you can isolate the country, you have to keep most of the restrictions in place until the vaccine.

Miccoli

It's hard to say really, there have been studies from Loughborough University which concluded lockdown has caused more deaths than the virus.

Personally I think we should of gone with a similar approach to Sweden. However if we had done nothing at all it would of been catastrophic for the elderly population.

RandomViewer

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

Maybe 1000-2000 more deaths in the country and overall things would be much better than they currently are.

Would have been much higher, add a zero to the end, you got to figure we'd be looking at dose levels similar to hospital exposure

Miccoli

Miccoli wrote: »

It's hard to say really, there have been studies from Loughborough University which concluded lockdown has caused more deaths than the virus.

Personally I think we should of gone with a similar approach to Sweden. However if we had done nothing at all it would of been catastrophic for the elderly population.

Intrigued to see this study. Have a link handy?

endacl

Sesshoumaru wrote: »

What do you think yourself?

That’s not how this works. Mr F is only responsible for the initial brainfart. After that it’s up to those with patience for him to tease things out.

HeidiHeidi

Lots of posters here saying "just wear a fecking mask, already".


While I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly, I think that masks are only an add-on to the three basics - distancing, cough/sneeze etiquette and hand hygiene.


In my experience, distancing has more or less completely gone out the window - some people still make a bit of an effort around shops or other indoor areas, but really almost everyone is acting like (our previous) normal.


I suspect that hand washing has to a large extent gone out the window as well, but obviously can't provide evidence for that.


You'd hope that people would at least cough/sneeze into their elbow or a tissue instead of into their hand (or God forbid someone else's face :eek:), but I think we'll have to wait for the cold/flu season to see how that one goes.


But I fear that it's all about masks in most people's heads, and they won't do it alone.


Not quite an answer to the OP's question, but had to get it out there!

Miccoli

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Intrigued to see this study. Have a link handy?

https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/news/2020/july/new-approach-to-recording-covid-deaths/

Bit cynical

Miccoli wrote: »

It's hard to say really, there have been studies from Loughborough University which concluded lockdown has caused more deaths than the virus.

Personally I think we should of gone with a similar approach to Sweden. However if we had done nothing at all it would of been catastrophic for the elderly population.

There was also a lot of panic over the Imperial College model which appears to have over-exaggerated the amount of deaths that would have occurred.

I've been following the Swedish approach since the early days. Their deaths to date are roughly the same as Ireland's when the age profile of the respective countries are taken into account. Although it is still a little early to say, it doesn't look as if they will have much problems with schools as they were open while cases were falling in that country.

The basic philosophy of balancing flattening the curve with an expansion of ICU capacity seems to have worked for them. Although they have had to take more deaths up front than their Scandinavian neighbours, the numbers have been nowhere near as high as the mathematical models, upon which other countries based their strategies, would have predicted.

Tenzor07

Bit cynical wrote: »

I've been following the Swedish approach since the early days. Their deaths to date are roughly the same as Ireland's when the age profile of the respective countries are taken into account. Although it is still a little early to say, it doesn't look as if they will have much problems with schools as they were open while cases were falling in that country..

The joke is that the Swede's can't wait for the 2m distance rule to end so they can go back to their usual 5m distance.....

Irish Steve

Continue as normal.

That's a very thought provoking statement, in that much of what is taken as "normal" in this country is just not normal, but we've been persuaded by all sorts of different influences to see it as normal.

What do I mean?

The Political system is so fundamentally broken, I'm not sure if it can be fixed and made Normal any more. I'm not talking about just the TD's and senators, the underlying problem is that the entire state system is so badly broken, it doesn't matter which party is nominally in power, they can't do what they really want to, or need to, as the people in the State services are very adept at "influencing" their leaders to do what they see as the right direction. For a few examples, look on something like Youtube for some of the old historic episodes of "yes minister", or "yes prime minister". If it wasn't so serious, it would be even funnier, but the tragedy is that Irish State systems have become the real power and they are unapproachable and untouchable. Fail, and the reward will be a promotion to a new role at a higher salary, and with possibly a big "separation bonus" to emphasise how important it is not to rock the boat of the establishment.

I'm not sure how we change it now, other than to completely rethink how it operates, in too many areas of the political arena, there are 100 years of baggage with families that are only still there because of their name, and too many of them are not looking at the future for Ireland, they are only locked into making sure that they remain in office in order to make sure that they get their gold plated pensions at the end of it. Not all of them, we've seen some good people over the last while, and regardless of political affiliations, they did an excellent job in recent months. The whole and strong "parish pump" ethos means that we won't be able to change it any time soon, regardless of how much damage that same parochial attitude is damaging the view and future of Ireland.

The health services are also almost dysfunctional for similar reasons. The front line are amazing people, but too many of the people further up the ladder are not providing the level of service or support that the people at the sharp end need, and the resultant costs are only scary. It was all meant to change when the HSE was set up to merge the old health boards, but a number of flaws in how that was done means that the whole process was broken before it even started.

Then we have the wonderful historic spectre of local authorities, built and operated around feudal boundaries that were established centuries ago. Each one of them has a management structure that's only frightening in terms of cost and duplication, so we have nearly 40 parallel organisations for a population of as near as makes no difference 5 million.

Then we move on to the way that people in the state relate to those state services, and that's our next problem.

There are a number of groups, which I'm not going to name for fear of stirring up off topic nonsense, and those groups have no will or desire to properly engage with or respect the state system, and no willingness to contribute a fair share to the costs of providing state services.

At this stage, part of me is thinking that Covid may actually force change in a number of areas that otherwise would have remained fossilised for perpetuity, and if we are lucky, those changes will start to make the new "normal" more acceptable and suitable for the type of society that we want to live in.

So, maybe the Normal that we had before Covid is something that we shouldn't be looking to return to, and we should be using this time of fundamental upheaval to rethink and restructure what we do and how we do it so that Ireland is truly ready to take full advantage of the opportunities that will present themselves when things start to recover.

Richard Hillman

Sweden have had 571 deaths per million
We have had 378 deaths per million.
One of the first country's to shut up shop was Slovenia. They had 62 deaths per million (and next door to Italy BTW)

The Swedish approach means roughly an extra 1000 deaths.
The Slovenian approach would have meant roughly 1500 less Irish deaths.

It's hard to know though if the inevitable is being delayed or not. Maybe the deaths will come for Slovenia and ourselves and level off with Sweden.

We won't know until 3-4 years on who eventually had the right approach. One thing is for sure though, you can't shut up shop forever.

bodhrandude

I'm trying to imagine what it would be like if all the music festivals and gigs went ahead, there is a good chance I wouldn't be typing this at the moment.

Wanderer78

A hell of a lot more dead and dying people, more extremely ill, more with serious life long illness, and probably a global depression, we re not doing too bad considering

mcmoustache

Italy provided a pretty good example of what would happen if people continued on as normal. It actually happened and is well documented and it's not even that long ago.

It was pretty bad.

Basically, loads of people get sick, overwhelm the health service with their numbers and in a double-whammy, deplete the health service of staff by making them sick. Hospitals crawl with covid and people avoid them for all but the worst emergencies.

And that's without getting into the long-term effects or the psychological and economic problems brought about by changes in peoples' behaviour as they deal with a world where catching this thing is a daily risk.

growleaves

Results won't be surprising I think, but we need only wait a few more weeks to see the result.

We hear that every few weeks yet some states never locked down in the first place and had less bad results than the states that did. But hey keep giving it a few more weeks.