Have NPHET lost the attention of people?

facehugger99

mohawk wrote: »

I wonder how of that 10.8% were already in hospital for something unrelated to Covid. I don’t think the HSE know themselves.

A large proportion I'd wager - hospitalised with Covid is completely different than hospitalised because of Covid.

The reality is that the testing is only picking up a fraction of people who have had Covid so the actual hospitalisation rate is very, very small.

And still you have hysteria-merchants bleating about a 20% rate - Laughable.

Covid will be looked back on as a very mild disease.

MelbourneMan

normanoffside wrote: »

I don't think they recognised they are wrong, they just recognised they weren't going to get their way.

In giving different scientific advice, they must have corrected flaws in their analysis. They dont change what they advise or negotiate with the govt. They provide info, and the govt takes account of that, as well as wider factors of economy and society, and makes the decision to implement. The scientific analysis doesnt change. Had NPHET been correct last Sunday, they would have provided the same read and medical advice, and probably even stronger given their view that the position deteriorated since then. It looks like Holohan was just out of touch and got too strongly involved a bit too early, and screwed things up.

Vieira82

normanoffside wrote: »

NPHET are now completely going against WHO advice which is to avoid lockdowns.


https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1314573157827858434

It's absolutely shocking the level of missinformation about this. WHO has been advocating for this for months on months!

Plenty of countries that avoided lockdowns by implementing effective track and tracing systems. Again, this WHO press conference from a few weeks back where Dr. Mike Ryan explains this from one hour on on the video bellow:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?extid=PPlCBraUANDJTJPr&v=613855985950549&ref=watch_permalink

Lockdowns are always a last minute solution when everything else fails and plenty of govs in Europe failing atm because all of the recommendation to avoid lockdowns are only "suggested" and not "enforced" by any governments.

Andrewf20

Independent website has this article also. I get the feeling the narrative is slowly starting to turn...

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/saturday-read-can-we-save-lives-and-livelihoods-in-the-fight-against-covid-39603010.html

"...he says, Ireland could learn a lot from the German approach."

"There will be no nationwide lockdown in Germany again," he says. "The strong feeling there is that it just doesn't work. Once you reopen, infections go up again. And locking down is devastating for jobs and the economy."

"Instead, they look at localised restrictions and they communicate clearly about why any restrictions are being imposed on certain places."

"The difficulty I have with 'zero Covid' strategies and national lockdowns from an economic point of view is that there seems to be very little analysis of the cost of that," says Lucey. "It's beginning to seep into the debate a bit more..."

political analyst

What evidence does NPHET have for its recommendation of Level 5? Outside Dublin and Donegal, Level 3 was introduced last Wednesday. So how would NPHET know that the number of cases would increase to the point where Level 5 would be necessary?

MelbourneMan

political analyst wrote: »

What evidence does NPHET have for its recommendation of Level 5?

None. They are implicitly acknowledging it was a mistake, and that the evidence indicates Level 3 is the correct strategy at the moment. Id give them a break on this. Mistakes happen. The govt advisory group and the cabinet were there to catch and correct it, implement the correct action on Monday, and NEPHT corrected their error by Thursday. They system still worked.

VG31

MelbourneMan wrote: »

None. They are implicitly acknowledging it was a mistake, and that the evidence indicates Level 3 is the correct strategy at the moment. Id give them a break on this. Mistakes happen. The govt advisory group and the cabinet were there to catch and correct it, implement the correct action on Monday, and NEPHT corrected their error by Thursday. They system still worked.

It wasn't a mistake. It was Tony flexing his muscles.

MelbourneMan

VG31 wrote: »

It wasn't a mistake. It was Tony flexing his muscles.

Tony making a mistake then. Im sure he has apologised privately to his team and to the politicos for the **** storm and they will have cut him some slack given he is just back after the long hiatus and the personal circumstances. Id say the rest of Nphet set him straight too. And now he is on board.

BENDYBINN

VG31 wrote: »

It wasn't a mistake. It was Tony flexing his muscles.

Agree, basically told the Dr. that replaced him all summer that he hadn’t a clue.
Fair play to Varadkar for calling him out.

CIARAN_BOYLE

normanoffside wrote: »

I don't think they recognised they are wrong, they just recognised they weren't going to get their way.

Agreed. You can't say level 5 level 5 level 5. If you say level 5 and they say no you have to say something different.

In this case they came out and said if you are going to say no level 5 and say level 3 you had better enforce it rather than play games.

karlitob

Andrewf20 wrote: »

Exactly

The links say influenza deaths were 97 & 255 in the 2 winter seasons mentioned yet the link at the bottom of my post gives a figure of around 4000 respiratory deaths in each year. The reports with 97 and 255 deaths were called "influenza and other respiratory illnesses" so strange how numbers are so low even if it only covers the winter "season" instead of 12 months. I'm not sure what to believe.

Another article from the Irish times in 2015 said that an average of 2800 people die in Ireland each winter from respiratory diseases. If the "winter" season is taken as 3 months it works out at about 30 deaths per day.

There alot of data and interpetation of sift through with these reports I find so I could be easily missing something. I'll need more time to get my head around it.[/quote]

Yeah - there is a lot to be fair. In general, the two main sources of death stats are the cso which uses death certificates (but lots of other sources really) for the entire population. And then hipe which is for people who die in hospital. The hipe data looks at the main condition that you have when you came Into to hospital - not necessarily what you died from - again that’s the death cert.

After that - it’s as good as what data is put in. Remember people with ms or Parkinson’s die from a respiratory infection usually (not necessarily flu) but really they die from Parkinson’s - if that makes sense.

Flu is a specific disease but you might die from pneumonia. That’s why ‘respiratory’ is a good high level catch all.

What I will say is that the hpsc work the stats on flu that you referenced and they’re working the stats on Covid. So whatever they say about both - I trust.

karlitob

NewMan1982 wrote: »

Another point to note is all the restrictions we have in place currently would also help stop the spread of other viruses like influenza.

That doesn’t seem right to me. Would you have any stats? I guess Australia would be best to go on and we won’t really know until the new year.

Asian countries would be interesting to look at. Culturally they wear masks but not sure if the rates of flu are less. If not, that says more about masks than all the other restrictions.

karlitob

Divisadero wrote: »

Unfortunately at this stage the only solution is robust enforcement..

Like all compliance issues - a balance of carrot and stick is required, underpinned by personal responsibility. The balance bit is hard because - as I see - The problem with compliance issues of course is that everyone has to agree that there is a problem - or perhaps the nature and extent of the problem - before there can be agreement on what is reasonable in terms of carrot, stick and responsibility.

And ever anon.

karlitob

Richard Hillman wrote: »

I think it's the fact that when the Virus first came we were treated with horror stories in the media of China and Italy, as if it was like Ebola. People were hidden away in their homes afraid to come out to this death Virus.

Then when it did come to our shores, it was nothing like they portrayed it on TV. Life went on pretty much normally bar everything was closed and we were told to stay close to home.

It was hyped up as a death virus, killing regular folk left right and centre. What transpired was that it killed people that were already at deaths door. Healthy people were barely affected, some wouldn't even know they had it.

So the publics increasing lazze-fáire attitude is more to do with the reality of the Virus. Its very unlikely to kill you. A few days of being very uncomfortable and that's your lot.

Well.....it kinda was that like in Italy and New York (and China). You could argue that all of us - internationally - learned quickly....and avoided that scenario.

It’s hard then to prove that what was done worked because it didn’t happen.

I’m not disagreeing with your point, per se. Just think that it’s a common response to other issues. For example, - and maybe a bad example - but all the Regulations on car production quality and safety legislation - seat belt, speed limits, crumple zones etc. Hard to say what works but all of them together do - or maybe hard to say that they do work rather than what works.

Loafing Oaf

karlitob wrote: »

That doesn’t seem right to me. Would you have any stats? I guess Australia would be best to go on and we won’t really know until the new year.

Southern hemisphere has record low flu cases amid Covid lockdowns

General practitioners in New Zealand have not detected a single influenza case since they started screening patients in June, health data shows; last year about 57% of the samples they collected were positive.

karlitob

Andrewf20 wrote: »

I think you are right, the deaths will lag but rise also. But I'm trying to get a picture of respiratory hospitalisation for previous years. So for example if respiratory hospitalisation for the last few years in early October was say on average 36 cases vs 179 now and icu numbers were an average of 9 instead of 30, id say fair enough. Things could be kicking off. But if the numbers for previous years were similar to now, it may be a sign of nothing to be alarmed about.

I'd basically like to see your graph go back 2 - 3 years.

I understand what you’re trying to do but it’s not comparing like with like. I get the point people make with numbers who die etc. But the issue is about the infectiousness Of Covid. So while on paper the rates of harm etc etc of Covid v flu might be the same or thereabouts - it’s the infectiousness of Covid that could make more people sick is what the worry is. It’s much more infectious than flu.

At least that’s what I’ve read.

karlitob

MOH wrote: »

I've lost all faith in the government or NPHET, and I've pretty much given up on following their recommendations. But it's not because I'm some kind of conspiracy theorist, or I don't believe in masks or social distancing, or the need for restrictions.

I'll still wear a mask, and keep my distance from people, and limit my contacts (I've seen nine people since March), because that's basic common sense during a respiratory pandemic and I want to protect myself and the people I care about. And I'll follow whatever seems to be international best advice. Because I want to get back to some level of normality, and clearly some level of restrictions are necessary.

But the problem is, it's all pointless.

We were told back in March that we needed to flatten the curve. To buy time to ramp up resources and infrastructure to deal with the pandemic. And for the most part, the public did their part (apart from the muppets who insisted on having mates over and house parties).

The government and medical services didn't. The lockdown went on longer than necessary because they failed to get the required levels of testing implemented in time.
We were supposed to be contact tracing - the chairman of NPHET said in June that with the additional testing and tracing capacity we should be able to quickly target and isolate clusters and quarantine contacts, instead of returning to a national-level lockdown. Instead, we find out a few weeks ago that there's zero effort being put into tracing how clusters started, which is why 70% of them are recorded as being in private homes. We're told we don't have the resources to do this "academic exercise", despite the fact that this is the most valuable information we could have in terms of suppressing the pandemic. And that we were standing down contract tracing centres as the country reopened because there wasn't enough for them to do. When instead we could have seen
as things opened exactly how it was starting to spread.

We have a whole cadre of medical professional pushing a so-called "zero-covid" approach (what happened to "flatten the curve"?), despite the fact that it is blindingly obvious that this is impossible. We share a very porous land border with a country that's recording new cases five times as fast as us. Which is irrelevant, because we have failed to enforce any kind of quarantine in our own airports. I know people who visited relatives in Europe during the summer and were checked on a regular basis, in person, that they were where they were supposed to be or face a fine of 1500. Here, people aren't even bothering to fill in the forms on arrival. We are not New Zealand, how ever much Leo might crave the level of attention and praise Jacinda Ardern has received.

There was a ton of fanfare about the wonderful, detailed, clearly-defined five stage plan the government had prepared, so that we would all know in advance exactly what moving to each stage would mean for everyone. Aside from the chaos of the launch, and the muppetry last weekend, the plan is meaningless. It's been edited at least three times this week. There's no point having an advance plan if you keep changing it every five minutes.

The government and NPHET are facing an uphill battle because they have utterly failed the people of this country (although admittedly a large part of the blame lies with Leo's previous government).

How do you expect people to respect you, and make difficult sacrifices, when you repeatedly fail to live up to your end of the bargain?

There’s a lot wrong with this post.

You say you’ve given up on following the recommendations - then go on to describe yourself following the recommendations.


You says it pointless because other people aren’t - well that’s the same as not following any law or socially responsible thing to do just because others don’t.


The goal of test and trace is to prevent spread. It’s not to determine source. It is an academic exercise as it’s always done retrospectively. This is an unprecedented (maybe not) global pandemic. While obviously finding the source is worthwhile - it’s not the priority. Preventing spread is.


Medical professionals pushing zero Covid is only an opinion. Not policy by our elected representatives. If you don’t want to listen to them then don’t. If you can find any other topic on anything in the world ever where everyone agrees - then I’d like to hear about it.


And finally, if you think can ramp up a national test and trace system in a few months, then you’re delusional. It takes years put any national project in place - staff, expertise, iCT, funding etc. All the people who’ve been working on this - and there’s been a lot - have been working flat out for months. And have to do their own job on top of that. There’s more to healthcare than Covid.

karlitob

mr zulu wrote: »

Yes, talked to my friend last night, his daughter with a underlying condition went for a blood test, they tested her for covid and she had it, father, mother and brother were tested positive as well, not one of them had symptoms.

So? We already know what relative ranges of severity there are for those diagnosed? What’s your point? Do you want macro policy to be based on your anecdotal evidence of ‘your friend’?

Charles Babbage

karlitob wrote: »

That doesn’t seem right to me. Would you have any stats? I guess Australia would be best to go on and we won’t really know until the new year.

Australia gets worst flu in July/August, which is mid winter., like January here. The anti Covid measures have reduced flu, which is one reason the flu vaccine here is delayed as they had fewer cases to develop the vaccine.



https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/07/health/covid-flu-season-fall/index.html

karlitob

Charles Babbage wrote: »

Australia gets worst flu in July/August, which is mid winter., like January here. The anti Covid measures have reduced flu, which is one reason the flu vaccine here is delayed as they had fewer cases to develop the vaccine.



https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/07/health/covid-flu-season-fall/index.html

Thanks. Thought as much. I’m sure someone will blame the HSE for that.

McHardcore

Charles Babbage wrote: »

Australia gets worst flu in July/August, which is mid winter., like January here. The anti Covid measures have reduced flu, which is one reason the flu vaccine here is delayed as they had fewer cases to develop the vaccine.



https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/07/health/covid-flu-season-fall/index.html

Thats really interesting. We should hope to expect a drop in deaths from the flu/pneumonia then as well.

Dempo1

Dear God, over 1000 new cases tonight, that must be the highest since this started, just shocking, I somehow suspect those who may have lost confidence in NPHET, might be having a rethink tonight. Leo must be tucking into some humble pie this evening and Michael Martin wondering, why o why did I get into this mess.

https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/1010/1170649-holohan-transmission-interrupt-virus/

This is why the people calling for NPET to be disbanded are suffering from covid restrictions delusion syndrome.

McHardcore

Dempo1 wrote: »

Dear God, over 1000 new cases tonight, that must be the highest since this started, just shocking, I somehow suspect those who may have lost confidence in NPHET, might be having a rethink tonight. Leo must be tucking into some humble pie this evening and Michael Martin wondering, why o why did I get into this mess.

It is worrying. We had 1068 cases on April 15. That was the highest that we got.

What is very worrying is that the percentage of positive tests has doubled to 6.5%.
I would like this to remove any doubt in the people who say "more cases is because of more testing" but unfortunately I dont think it will. They will find something else to question the health experts on.

facehugger99

It's great to see case numbers on the rise. It means people are getting sick of these stupid restrictions over a relatively harmless virus. Number of deaths are tiny once again and no doubt consist of people in their late 80's or 90's.

Let the vulnerable isolate themselves for a few months, the rest of the country needs to get on with their lives.

Hopefully we can see this very positive trend continuing into next week.

facehugger99

facehugger99 wrote: »

It's great to see case numbers on the rise. It means people are getting sick of these stupid restrictions over a relatively harmless virus. Number of deaths are tiny once again and no doubt consist of people in their late 80's or 90's.

Let the vulnerable isolate themselves for a few months, the rest of the country needs to get on with their lives.

Hopefully we can see this very positive trend continuing into next week.

There is no good spin on this. Sad to see a view that is so warped from reality.

Andrewf20

Belgium health professionals as well as Germany now starting to call into question the validity of lockdown measures. Its death profile follows a similar profile to ours. Peak in Spring, deaths low now...

https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/128704/hundreds-of-medical-experts-question-belgiums-coronavirus-policy-in-2-open-letters/

It mentions:

The number of cancer diagnoses has been halved (less than 2,500 diagnoses per month in our country), which is expected to lead to a significant excess mortality.

On a psychosocial level, the lockdown has led to an increase in domestic violence and child abuse. The poverty rate is exploding. It is well known that poverty reduces life expectancy by several years. The significant stress that the lockdown entailed will undoubtedly lead to dire consequences for the mental health of the Belgian population.

They also compare the virus to the seasonal flu, which they say causes between 320,000 and 650,000 deaths worldwide every year, but which did not see societies locking down or shielding the elderly

Lollipop95

A very stressful time for many people. I just got a new job after being made redundant a few months back as a result of COVID and now fear with another lockdown on the horizon, it will happen again. It’s just the type of job training that really would work better in the office and in person. I understand everyone’s health must come first and if we go up a level, I will comply but it’s so disheartening

Dempo1

McHardcore wrote: »

It is worrying. We had 1068 cases on April 15. That was the highest that we got.

What is very worrying is that the percentage of positive tests has doubled to 6.5%.
I would like this to remove any doubt in the people who say "more cases is because of more testing" but unfortunately I dont think it will. They will find something else to question the health experts on.

I hadn't realised both the highest number was in April or that positive tests percentage had doubled, thanks, it is very very alarming particularly the fact that level3 in a number of counties previously hasn't worked.

Dempo1

Lollipop95 wrote: »

A very stressful time for many people. I just got a new job after being made redundant a few months back as a result of COVID and now fear with another lockdown on the horizon, it will happen again. It’s just the type of job training that really would work better in the office and in person. I understand everyone’s health must come first and if we go up a level, I will comply but it’s so disheartening

It is disheartening and whilst easy to say, it's important to remain focused. It has to end sometime but clearly a new approach needed. I too am I'm a similar situation but infact, went back after months off only to be laid off again. Just a roller coaster of uncertainty.