What if we had continued as normal?

Capt'n Midnight

JDD wrote: »

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.

If there's no vaccine then only those who had enough equipment and hospital space would have come out ahead.

Even then the death rate for people on ventilators has dropped by a third already thanks to off the shelf steroids so lots of people would have died needlessly.

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

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

We've already had nearly 2,000 deaths. And the antibody study suggests only 5% exposure. So minimum 30,000 deaths to get "herd immunity." And it might not last. Flu vaccines only provide immunity for a year.



It's not just deaths. We know the short term effects on survivors can be bad. We don't know what the long term health effects are yet. Chickenpox is a childhood disease that for 30% comes back as Shingles in later life. It's unlikely to be the same with Covid but ?


This is one way coronavirus can change your life and it didn't involve damage to internal organs which a log of people get.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-53551673

A woman who had a quadruple amputation has said "it makes no sense" she will have to wait three months before being paid disability allowance.

Caroline Coster, 58, caught coronavirus in March but had her hands and feet amputated after getting sepsis.

She questioned whether the wait to get her Personal Independence Payment (PIP) was "just in case they grow back".

Capt'n Midnight

Tenzor07 wrote: »

A Virus like a fire runs it's course, as it always has done, it's not going to destroy the same forest of trees again as it did the first time..

If you ignore the science it's not going to end well. A virus isn't going to be swayed by public opinion.

Not every virus or infection provides lifetime immunity. Covid isn't measles. Looked at my yellow booklet a while back, lots of expired vaccinations.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02278-5

If immunity to the virus lasts less than a year, for example, similar to other human coronaviruses in circulation, there could be annual surges in COVID-19 infections through to 2025 and beyond.

Tenzor07

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If you ignore the science it's not going to end well. A virus isn't going to be swayed by public opinion.
Not every virus or infection provides lifetime immunity. Covid isn't measles. Looked at my yellow booklet a while back, lots of expired vaccinations.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02278-5

I'm not a scientist but from what I read every virus has a lifecycle once it gets into the population.
Even if as some studies say you only get 3 months immunity it would be enough to almost eliminate the virus if the majority of people had it.

yosemitesam1

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If there's no vaccine then only those who had enough equipment and hospital space would have come out ahead.

Even then the death rate for people on ventilators has dropped by a third already thanks to off the shelf steroids so lots of people would have died needlessly.


We've already had nearly 2,000 deaths. And the antibody study suggests only 5% exposure. So minimum 30,000 deaths to get "herd immunity." And it might not last. Flu vaccines only provide immunity for a year.



It's not just deaths. We know the short term effects on survivors can be bad. We don't know what the long term health effects are yet. Chickenpox is a childhood disease that for 30% comes back as Shingles in later life. It's unlikely to be the same with Covid but ?


This is one way coronavirus can change your life and it didn't involve damage to internal organs which a log of people get.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-53551673

Covid hit our most at risk population disproportionately to the rest of the population.
A significant amount of the recorded covid deaths were deaths with a positive or assumed covid positive and not actually due to covid.
We would have rapidly ran out of highly susceptible people to die had the spread continued unabated

Capt'n Midnight

Tenzor07 wrote: »

I'm not a scientist but from what I read every virus has a lifecycle once it gets into the population.
Even if as some studies say you only get 3 months immunity it would be enough to almost eliminate the virus if the majority of people had it.

It would have to be the majority of people world wide at the same time. Otherwise there would be pockets to re-infect. And that's not counting the bats or pangolins or pigs or birds or squirrels or whatnot.

A coronavirus vaccine that killed one person in a thousand would be safer than trying to get herd immunity.

Without full population testing I can't confirm but it looks like a vaccine that provided lifetime immunity but killed one in a hundred would be safer than trying to get herd immunity.


It would overwhelm the health systems in OECD countries. Without ventilators and ICU the prognosis for severe cases would be extremely bleak. If you don't fully recover you won't get proper treatment either for organ damage or sepsis. And that will have knock on effects on cancer patients and elective surgery and A&E.

In non-OECD countries it will be worse.
That's why places like Vietnam said "screw this" and hit the big red button. Or look at the countries that had MERS or SARS.


So far of 21M reported cases only 13M have recovered. (and there's been three quarters of a million deaths) So one third of cases still have the disease. And the non-reported figures are worse



You've never had real flu unless you were worried you weren't going to make it. Covid-19 is worse.

GT89

Thought the original idea of lockdown was about stopping society falling apart but clearly was never going to happen. So they shifted goalposts for it to be about saving as many lives as possible destrying livelihoods and likely causing people to die indirectly as a result. It went on far too long it only should have been 2-3 weeks max.

Squiggle

HeidiHeidi wrote: »

Because most of the people who look after, and interact with, and are related to the "vulnerable" are "the rest of us". You can't just lock a whole section of society up somewhere and send food parcels.

Indeed but you don't need to lock them up and throw away the key. Just keep 2m away from them at all times along with gold standard respiratory etiquette etc. in their company. We need to learn to live with this virus.

HeidiHeidi

Squiggle wrote: »

Indeed but you don't need to lock them up and throw away the key. Just keep 2m away from them at all times along with gold standard respiratory etiquette etc. in their company. We need to learn to live with this virus.

And how does that work if you're administering medical or physical care to someone?

They need to hammer home the basics, hand hygiene / respiratory etiquette / distancing for EVERYONE. Then exceptions will be less risky where they cant be avoided.

And I have come to the conclusion (as we were warned by many) that the masks have become a false panacea - people are finally getting around to getting used to using them, and all other measures have gone straight out the window. I don't know how you solve that one, though, except as I say keep hammering the basics.

Apparently it's pretty much back to normal in Sweden..no masks..no lockdowns..no piles of bodies..

AdamD

Beasty wrote: »

I acknowledge I am well off but that does not diminish my views on the issue

6 months ago no-one had much of an idea about this virus. All countries were pretty much in the dark about it and its potential outcome. Even now we are not that much further down the line in understanding it, although dealing with it's consequences has improved as we've gone along

I would though challenge your comments about masks. PPE and masks were in very short supply for a long time. Front line staff were the priority but even they had to make do with re-using stuff. It would have been completely inappropriate to divert any of those masks to the general public. Indeed even Amazon were stopping people purchasing this sort of stuff as they were prioritising health workers (mainly UK ones on the .co.uk site)

I personally think Ireland is somewhere near the top of the class in the way it has handled this. Has it got every decision right? Absolutely not, but no-one has. It has done very well with limited resources. It may have seemed that some of the measures were OTT, but we will probably never know how much worse things could have been based on different decisions being made. And yes they could have improved things, but that is only with hindsight. There are few decisions taken that could be considered as inappropriate with the intelligence they had at the time

I don't think Ireland is even close to top of the class in virtually any Covid-related metric

Back to the main question of the OP:

Hierarchies like you see in Secondary School, would be omnipresent and flourish . A lot of coverups. A lot of two - facedness from TD's and councillors.

Squiggle

HeidiHeidi wrote: »

And how does that work if you're administering medical or physical care to someone?

PPE and I know two relatives doing just that. Far from easy but the current HSE advice is for the vulnerable to still cocoon !

Charles Babbage

Deleted User wrote: »

Apparently it's pretty much back to normal in Sweden..no masks..no lockdowns..no piles of bodies..

Sweden now has more restrictions than many European countries and has twice the rate of cases as Ireland. This is August, you get away with a lot in the summer when people are outside, this won't work in 3 or 4 months.

gmisk

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Apparently it's pretty much back to normal in Sweden..no masks..no lockdowns..no piles of bodies..

There deaths per 100k are a lot higher than Ireland no?

I would say culturally they are a world away from Ireland as well maybe compare their numbers to a neighbour like norway?
So compare them two maybe.

Norway 48 deaths per 100k
Sweden 573 deaths per 100k

I think they also have a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people, restrictions on visiting care homes, and shifted to table-only service in bars and restaurants.

marilynrr

I think it's impossible to tell really.

There would have been more initial deaths for sure but long term who knows.

I think the lockdown was such an extreme thing to happen that it was pretty much all any of us spoke about or thought about for months....because much of the world stopped there was nothing to discuss except for lockdown life and the virus and worst case scenarios and so on.

If the world had continued on as normal then there would have been a lot more other news...not 99% covid news ALL DAY LONG.

Of course people were going to be afraid to leave their houses if all they hear all day long from all angles is that they shouldn't leave their house because of the virus.

I don't think non vulnerable people would have been afraid to go to work at all. Some yes...but on a whole I think people would have carried on......because they would never have considered lockdown to be an alternative, the notion of the whole world locking down because of it would have been thought of as madness and not something that could happen in this day and age!!

bb1234567

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

Covid hit our most at risk population disproportionately to the rest of the population.
A significant amount of the recorded covid deaths were deaths with a positive or assumed covid positive and not actually due to covid.
We would have rapidly ran out of highly susceptible people to die had the spread continued unabated

You're making huge assumptions there and talking as if they're proven fact. Why is the virus still killing such large numbers in countries such as Brazil,Columbia,Mexico, Peru then where the average citizen is in their late twenties? Going by your logic their epidemics should have ended long long ago with deaths per capita far lower than Europe as the virus would have killed the small potential pool of susceptible people already as their populations are so young.

yosemitesam1

bb1234567 wrote: »

You're making huge assumptions there and talking as if they're proven fact. Why is the virus still killing such large numbers in countries such as Brazil,Columbia,Mexico, Peru then where the average citizen is in their late twenties? Going by your logic their epidemics should have ended long long ago with deaths per capita far lower than Europe as the virus would have killed the small potential pool of susceptible people already as their populations are so young.

Those countries you mention all have very different climates which result in respiratory diseases peaking at a different time of year to Europe. Give them 3 months and their cases/deaths will drop back in a similar way to how ours did.

Every population will have a certain amount of very susceptible. Comparing the age of people in a very poor country on a like for like basis with a rich country is by no means a fair comparison.
It's not your actual age that is the risk factor but state of health, so it stands to reason that a younger old person will be in the danger zone in South America when compared to Europe.

Nermal

30,000 is a huge, huge overestimate.

IFR is 0.3-0.6%, range of the population that would be infected is 20-60%.

A more realistic range is 3,000 - 18,000.

Let's be generous and assume these people would have lived on average another 5 years.

Government generally caps spending on medical interventions at €40,000 per life-year saved.

If you think our interventions came in at a cost less than €600M-€3.5B then they were worth it.

They didn't, of course.

bb1234567

Nermal wrote: »

30,000 is a huge, huge overestimate.

IFR is 0.3-0.6%, range of the population that would be infected is 20-60%.

A more realistic range is 3,000 - 18,000.

Let's be generous and assume these people would have lived on average another 5 years.

Government generally caps spending on medical interventions at €40,000 per life-year saved.

If you think our interventions came in at a cost less than €600M-€3.5B then they were worth it.

They didn't, of course.

The recent sero prevalence results indicate that the 30,000 figure was not an overestimate but pretty much bang on if you omit nursing home deaths from the IFR and assume 60% herd immunity , although I guess the accuracy of these tests is in question. Until there is actual proof though it does not appear to be an overestimated figure.

The consensus is an IFR global average of 0.65%, Ireland is likely on the higher end of this average probably approaching 1% IFR due to an aged population and high obesity rates.