The Belgian Approach

Boggles

Valhallapt wrote: »

Oh, okay ;-)

Well they don't.

And your inferred claim without screening breast and colon cancer for 4-5 months that leads to a doubling of instances of terminal cancer in under 40s is simple not true by any metric.

The vast vast vast majority of people who get screened do not have cancer.

The vast vast vast majority of people who present with terminal cancer have never been screened.

polesheep

is_that_so wrote: »

Nah, he spoke out against and wouldn't stand over the HSE public health measures. That's a P45 or resignation for someone in his position.

There's hardly a single medical professional in the country who isn't in some way connected to the HSE. It's not a private company or a political party, it should be open to criticism from within and without. It has a history of silencing or attempting to silence criticism that has resulted in tragedy. Let the HSE defend its position openly and honestly. The public, whom it serves, has a right to know if there is a difference of opinion within its ranks and what those opinions are.

wellwhynot

I am not surprised we have done little to increase our ICU beds since the start of the pandemic. Sweden meanwhile doubled theirs. Paul Reid is too busy pontificating on twitter to add any actual improvements to our hospitals.

The fact that they are only starting a €600 million winter plan now tells me everything I need to know. The government asked for time to prepare and we gave them that. It seems they didn’t value our time as nothing has changed in the hospitals.

Valhallapt

Valhallapt wrote: »

It’s too early for anything other than empirical data yet. But wife is a palliative nurse, her hospital is seeing over double the number of terminal cancer diagnosis compared to this time last year in those aged under 40.

But maybe you are right, stopping breast check and colon cancer screening for six months will have had no material impact.

Aha the old "there is no evidence" trope. Like at the beginning of the pandemic "there was no evidence" masks prevented spread of COVID. Now there is "no evidence" that we shouldn't be wearing a mask. "No evidence" being evidence of multiple double blind peer reviewed studies which would take years. OF COURSE there's no fcuking evidence, but if you had to make an educated guess, rather than just shut up everything it's pretty obvious which is the far more likely outcome.

wellwhynot

wellwhynot wrote: »

I am not surprised we have done little to increase our ICU beds since the start of the pandemic. Sweden meanwhile doubled theirs. Paul Reid is too busy pontificating on twitter to add any actual improvements to our hospitals.

The fact that they are only starting a €600 million winter plan now tells me everything I need to know. The government asked for time to prepare and we gave them that. It seems they didn’t value our time as nothing has changed in the hospitals.

Paul Reid announced earlier in the year that PPE would cost an extra €1 billion and testing and tracing an additional €1 billion to December. Maybe if he had tried to get better value some of that €2 billion could have been used to add ICU beds. We had medical professionals giving up good jobs abroad to pitch in yet pretty much none of them were used. An utter shambles again as usual.

I don't blame the government for this, I blame the cushy consultants contracts and the strong unions. Mary Harney had the right idea, but everyone said she was evil.

polesheep

polesheep wrote: »

There's hardly a single medical professional in the country who isn't in some way connected to the HSE. It's not a private company or a political party, it should be open to criticism from within and without. It has a history of silencing or attempting to silence criticism that has resulted in tragedy. Let the HSE defend its position openly and honestly. The public, whom it serves, has a right to know if there is a difference of opinion within its ranks and what those opinions are.

I know personally a couple of GPs and several people working at high levels in the health service. None of them has anything good to say about the HSE in private conversation. This is to distinguish of course the HSE from the frontline workers.

JD1763

Given the post that started this thread comparing ‘progressive’ measures in Belgium to ‘archaic’ Ireland, here’s the latest:

https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/135587/almost-4500-new-coronavirus-cases-per-day-in-belgium-all-indicators-keep-rising-covid-19-hospitalisations-deaths-sciensano/

Care to comment OP?

3xh

JD1763 wrote: »

Given the post that started this thread comparing ‘progressive’ measures in Belgium to ‘archaic’ Ireland, here’s the latest:

https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/135587/almost-4500-new-coronavirus-cases-per-day-in-belgium-all-indicators-keep-rising-covid-19-hospitalisations-deaths-sciensano/

Care to comment OP?

This quote is actually untrue in any sense of statistics......

‘Of those tests, about 39,900 were taken over the past week, with a positivity rate of 11.1%.

This means that, out of every ten people who get tested for Covid-19, more than one person gets a positive result. The percentage went up from 9.3% last week, meaning that even though more tests are being carried out – which naturally results in more confirmed infections – THE EPIDEMIC IS STILL GROWING’ (my bold)

An idiot knows you can’t say the epidemic is growing due to both positive cases from increased testing and positivity rate increasing. It could be that it’s simply down to more of those who just so happen to be positive being tested. That is all. Terrible journalism.

JD1763

And from the sense of statistics and your expert opinion, is there any issue with the reported number of hospitalisations, the rate of infection per 100,000 or the R number of 1.4 in the article?

Happydays2020

3xh wrote: »

This quote is actually untrue in any sense of statistics......

‘Of those tests, about 39,900 were taken over the past week, with a positivity rate of 11.1%.

This means that, out of every ten people who get tested for Covid-19, more than one person gets a positive result. The percentage went up from 9.3% last week, meaning that even though more tests are being carried out – which naturally results in more confirmed infections – THE EPIDEMIC IS STILL GROWING’ (my bold)

An idiot knows you can’t say the epidemic is growing due to both positive cases from increased testing and positivity rate increasing. It could be that it’s simply down to more of those who just so happen to be positive being tested. That is all. Terrible journalism.

Indeed we could increase our test positivity rate nearly overnight by only testing people with symptoms or double Testing capacity and have serial testing of low risk asymptomatic citizens.

fly_agaric

DaSilva wrote: »

"long lead times.", Jesus... We can't even pull the finger out in a pandemic?

Said it before (on another thread) but unless you have some sort of cloning or sleep training systems for doctors and nurses there's not much you can do in a few months.
These are highly skilled people who take a long time and a lot of money to train and are very much in demand globally.
The underfunded doctor training systems here seem (to me, as an outsider to the system) to be based on training up tiny small numbers of Irish doctors (the super high
leaving points & test score free places) paid for by a load of ultra-rich foreign students from ME and Asia on full fees.
A bit foolish IMO + has left us in trouble now.

3xh

JD1763 wrote: »

And from the sense of statistics and your expert opinion, is there any issue with the reported number of hospitalisations, the rate of infection per 100,000 or the R number of 1.4 in the article?

JD, my point is that in this never ending race to get the newest, bestest, most scientifically sounding article out asap, we come across a lot of these articles that if we actually read what they’re saying, they’re saying something else. This is one of those articles.

They said they’ve proof the epidemic is still growing. I showed how that cannot be proof.

As for hospitalisations, if they use this system of calling a patient with a broken leg that also tested positive a ‘hospitalisation’, fair enough. I’d just hope they say it as such and do not do what our NPHET do and make zero reference to that important fact.

I’m also aware the U.K. changed their death counting process in early August (quietly enough) to one where a Covid death is any death that occurs within 28 days of their last known positive test. Before (for example, in Mar-May) there was no time limit!

Stats!

JD1763

3xh wrote: »

JD, my point is that in this never ending race to get the newest, bestest, most scientifically sounding article out asap, we come across a lot of these articles that if we actually read what they’re saying, they’re saying something else. This is one of those articles.

They said they’ve proof the epidemic is still growing. I showed how that cannot be proof.

As for hospitalisations, if they use this system of calling a patient with a broken leg that also tested positive a ‘hospitalisation’, fair enough. I’d just hope they say it as such and do not do what our NPHET do and make zero reference to that important fact.

I’m also aware the U.K. changed their death counting process in early August (quietly enough) to one where a Covid death is any death that occurs within 28 days of their last known positive test. Before (for example, in Mar-May) there was no time limit!

Stats!

Fair enough.

My point is that the OP posted a thread called 'The Belgian Approach' with a link to an article from a US outlet about the 'progressive' nature of Belgium's measures and implied that this 'Belgian approach' was superior to 'archaic' Ireland.

I pointed out at the time in this thread, with a link to a Belgian source, that the situation was deteriorating in Belgium. It is now clear that the situation in Belgium has deteriorated even further despite these measures.

We can argue all day about how the media interprets and reports numbers and figures but there is no disputing that hospitals in Brussels are now at a capacity and their overflow capacity in neighbouring areas is also nearly exhausted.

So the 'progressive' measures the OP wanted Ireland to look to as an example were really not so good after all.

That is my issue with this thread and the OPs post.

Graces7

faceman wrote: »

If Ireland cared, we would have more icu beds. Matt Cooper confirmed that no new ICU beds have entered the system since March.

The real problem here is lack of fully trained nurses. It takes 6 months for a qualified nurse to train for ICU.

And each bed needs 6 ICU trained nurses.

And too many Irish, newly trained nurses are leaving Ireland as soon as the training Ireland paid for is completed. If they had to serve here for a few years that would make a great difference.

It is the same with doctors trained here . They leave the country without serving here.

3xh

JD1763 wrote: »

Fair enough.

My point is that the OP posted a thread called 'The Belgian Approach' with a link to an article from a US outlet about the 'progressive' nature of Belgium's measures and implied that this 'Belgian approach' was superior to 'archaic' Ireland.

I pointed out at the time in this thread, with a link to a Belgian source, that the situation was deteriorating in Belgium. It is now clear that the situation in Belgium has deteriorated even further despite these measures.

We can argue all day about how the media interprets and reports numbers and figures but there is no disputing that hospitals in Brussels are now at a capacity and their overflow capacity in neighbouring areas is also nearly exhausted.

So the 'progressive' measures the OP wanted Ireland to look to as an example were really not so good after all.

That is my issue with this thread and the OPs post.

Yep fair enough.

Regarding capacity, I’m not au-fait with the Belgian levels of hospital beds etc.

But looking at the U.K. and how the media are/were used, where are all those nightingale hospitals that were created in a week by the army and NGOs? I understand a lot were disbanded after never being used during Mar-May.

Yet you can see selective reports from the U.K. suggesting bed capacity is now full (that’s clearly rubbish and is worded a particular way for a reason)

Why not use these pop-up hospitals again then if they were the solution first time round (for non critical patients so as to free up hospitals for Covid patients)

I don’t mean to move away from Belgium but as I say, I’m not aware of their hospital capacity as much as the U.K. but the problems faced by both would be similar.

The media are a rotten force. Click bait articles and accepting lump sums from government to run a series of ads, editorials, etc. They’ll say anything.