Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

Turtwig

Klonker wrote: »

So you don't think an expert who thinks a country is being mislead and lied to by its public health experts should voice this publicly? That's a strange stance to have.

Which do you think would be more likely to be effective? He writes to NPHET privately to state he disagrees with them or to voice it publicly so everyone can hear and see, which should further the debate on the matter (he's been on RTE since his comment)? NPHET have supposedly read all the international data on this already as that's part of their job and came to an entirely different professional opinion as Mina so what's a private email going to achieve? As if NPHET would even tell us that they received such an email criticising them.

Nope. That's not my position.

There's a million better ways to handle it. Both Nolan and Mina have just made the discussion more polarised. Nolan should offer a private meeting with his group and Mina.

Mina should read Nphets own statements rather than jump on snippets in media interviews and tweets. Science isn't done that way. Not everybody agrees with his position on the Cochrane review. He should acknowledge that. Doesn't mean he has to agree with it.

There's no chance of a resolution let alone constructive dialogue through twitter. Both parties in this have just confounded the issue. To the point that Donnelly's point about propaganda may end up become a self fulfilling prophecy.

Nolan feels that we're all entitled to his opinion. He forgets now that his "tweets" are out in the public domain, not in a lab full of colleagues.. he looks ever the twat and now it's in black and white there's no defending because when you're explaining you're losing as they say in media, which is where he's put himself whist simultaneously taken himself out of the lab into the platform of disinformation.. in fact like trump he should be banned for that shyte.
it was always going to happen, he had one baby sham too many and took on a franchise. Good man Prof..straight back to worrying about MRSA and the male pattern baldness gene for that man!

Klonker

rusty cole wrote: »

Nolan feels that we're all entitled to his opinion. He forgets now that his "tweets" are out in the public domain, not in a lab full of colleagues.. he looks ever the twat and now it's in black and white there's no defending because when you're explaining you're losing as they say in media, which is where he's put himself whist simultaneously taken himself out of the lab into the platform of disinformation.. in fact like trump he should be banned for that shyte.
it was always going to happen, he had one baby sham too many and took on a franchise. Good man Prof..

NPHET's press conference tomorrow will be interesting.

Amirani

Turtwig wrote: »

Nope. That's not my position.

There's a million better ways to handle it. Both Nolan and Mina have just made the discussion more polarised. Nolan should offer a private meeting with his group and Mina.

Mina should read Nphets own statements rather than jump on snippets in media interviews and tweets. Science isn't done that way. Not everybody agrees with his position on the Cochrane review. He should acknowledge that. Doesn't mean he has to agree with it.

There's no chance of a resolution let alone constructive dialogue through twitter. Both parties in this have just confounded the issue. To the point that Donnelly's point about propaganda may end up become a self fulfilling prophecy.

Agreed on the all the above.

Anthony O'Connor sums up a bit of the Mina nonsense here: https://twitter.com/Antcon7062/status/1392942440340930565?s=20

Certain segment of Irish people have decided that Mina is this guru who must be correct, likely because of the Cambridge tagline. I've a doctor friend who's also doing fellowship in Harvard and working in Brigham (same as Mina). They're one of the most impressive people I know, but they're not automatically right on everything health-related, nor would they claim to be.

Mina wading into some Twitter dialogue that he has less than half the story on is no better than Nolan's ill-judged Tweet.

Klonker

Turtwig wrote: »

Nope. That's not my position.

There's a million better ways to handle it. Both Nolan and Mina have just made the discussion more polarised. Nolan should offer a private meeting with his group and Mina.

Mina should read Nphets own statements rather than jump on snippets in media interviews and tweets. Science isn't done that way. Not everybody agrees with his position on the Cochrane review. He should acknowledge that. Doesn't mean he has to agree with it.

There's no chance of a resolution let alone constructive dialogue through twitter. Both parties in this have just confounded the issue. To the point that Donnelly's point about propaganda may end up become a self fulfilling prophecy.

The discussion doesn't have to be on twitter. Mina has been on RTE since his first twitter comment and I don't it'll be the last time he'll be on media over here. That wouldn't be happening if he didn't make that tweet. Government love telling us that they are following the science, his our chance to a good public discussion of the science and not just what NPHETand NIAC decide behind closed doors. I don't see the downside of that.

Klonker

Klonker wrote: »

NPHET's press conference tomorrow will be interesting.

if it is interesting, it will be the first one ever!

He's like the nerd who was goaded into posting something by a stunner who'd never look at him otherwise only the stunner is his own ego and the driver is his vanity.. when you see your face every day on the news beside words like hope..saved..critical.. you start to believe that your the one that decides if these things will happen.. that's essentially a god complex, it's why robbie William did so well for the time he did...or a halo effect..just because a person is trustworthy in one regard on general impression, don't believe for one minute that carries through to all areas like their stance on antigen tests for instance..

Amirani

Amirani wrote: »

Agreed on the all the above.

Anthony O'Connor sums up a bit of the Mina nonsense here: https://twitter.com/Antcon7062/status/1392942440340930565?s=20

Certain segment of Irish people have decided that Mina is this guru who must be correct, likely because of the Cambridge tagline. I've a doctor friend who's also doing fellowship in Harvard and working in Brigham (same as Mina). They're one of the most impressive people I know, but they're not automatically right on everything health-related, nor would they claim to be.

Mina wading into some Twitter dialogue that he has less than half the story on is no better than Nolan's ill-judged Tweet.

istn the real issue that we have to have a yank come on national TV and call this shtye out?? if any other doctor here did it, they'd be sacked in the morning
or threatned with a hurley!

I agree in one sense on the Harvard thing and the free publicity for our American friend but if nobody in an irish jersey can say it without being discredited , attacked or being labeled an anti Vax loon then why not somebody with clout in another jurisdiction, if that's what it takes to put nolan in his place..his hand has been slapped and I dont care to be honest.

Turtwig

Klonker wrote: »

The discussion doesn't have to be on twitter. Mina has been on RTE since his first twitter comment and I don't it'll be the last time he'll be on media over here. That wouldn't be happening if he didn't make that tweet. Government love telling us that they are following the science, his our chance to a good public discussion of the science and not just what NPHETand NIAC decide behind closed doors. I don't see the downside of that.

I dont see a downside to discussion. I do see the downside to having it in the media. That's just impossible to be any way useful. Complex discussions of this kind through the media are pointless. Often counterproductive.

Normal One

https://twitter.com/newschambers/status/1392884471855292419?s=21

Great to see the vaccine effect.

WoollyRedHat

The 5-micron boundary fallacy: 'The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill'

Excellent write up and compelling reading from Wired on how indoor air researchers and aerosol scientists eventually convinced the CDC and WHO that their risk calculus was wrong in terms of airborne spread and risk with the help of a graduate history student, who went back into the past to discover the origins of the 5 micron airborne definition. Randall uncovered research from William Firth Wells, who was the first to uncover that tuberculosis was an airborne disease in 1962. The 5-micron airborne definition originated from this time period, stemming from a CDC tuberculosis guidance document.

The WHO and the CDC quietly changed their guidance on how Covid may spread at end of April after research was published by Marr and Li that they could no longer ignore.

All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences.

EARLY ONE MORNING, Linsey Marr tiptoed to her dining room table, slipped on a headset, and fired up Zoom. On her computer screen, dozens of familiar faces began to appear. She also saw a few people she didn’t know, including Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, and other expert advisers to the WHO. It was just past 1 pm Geneva time on April 3, 2020, but in Blacksburg, Virginia, where Marr lives with her husband and two children, dawn was just beginning to break.

Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake.

Over Zoom, they laid out the case. They ticked through a growing list of superspreading events in restaurants, call centers, cruise ships, and a choir rehearsal, instances where people got sick even when they were across the room from a contagious person. The incidents contradicted the WHO’s main safety guidelines of keeping 3 to 6 feet of distance between people and frequent handwashing. If SARS-CoV-2 traveled only in large droplets that immediately fell to the ground, as the WHO was saying, then wouldn’t the distancing and the handwashing have prevented such outbreaks? Infectious air was the more likely culprit, they argued. But the WHO’s experts appeared to be unmoved. If they were going to call Covid-19 airborne, they wanted more direct evidence—proof, which could take months to gather, that the virus was abundant in the air. Meanwhile, thousands of people were falling ill every day...

The distinction between droplet and airborne transmission has enormous consequences. To combat droplets, a leading precaution is to wash hands frequently with soap and water. To fight infectious aerosols, the air itself is the enemy. In hospitals, that means expensive isolation wards and N95 masks for all medical staff.

The books Marr flipped through drew the line between droplets and aerosols at 5 microns. A micron is a unit of measurement equal to one-millionth of a meter. By this definition, any infectious particle smaller than 5 microns in diameter is an aerosol; anything bigger is a droplet. The more she looked, the more she found that number. The WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also listed 5 microns as the fulcrum on which the droplet-aerosol dichotomy toggled.

There was just one literally tiny problem: “The physics of it is all wrong,” Marr says. ...Reality is far messier, with particles much larger than 5 microns staying afloat and behaving like aerosols, depending on heat, humidity, and airspeed. “I’d see the wrong number over and over again, and I just found that disturbing,” she says. The error meant that the medical community had a distorted picture of how people might get sick.

Li’s elegant simulations showed that when a person coughed or sneezed, the heavy droplets were too few and the targets—an open mouth, nostrils, eyes—too small to account for much infection. Li’s team had concluded, therefore, that the public health establishment had it backward and that most colds, flu, and other respiratory illnesses must spread through aerosols instead.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

is_that_so

Klonker wrote: »

The discussion doesn't have to be on twitter. Mina has been on RTE since his first twitter comment and I don't it'll be the last time he'll be on media over here. That wouldn't be happening if he didn't make that tweet. Government love telling us that they are following the science, his our chance to a good public discussion of the science and not just what NPHET and NIAC decide behind closed doors. I don't see the downside of that.

I do wish people would align acronyms with what they do! NIAC have absolutely nothing to do with this, they offer opinions on vaccines. Have you read the report by our own task force on the possible use of antigen tests? We do have an overview of a plan.

is_that_so

WoollyRedHat wrote: »

The 5-micron boundary fallacy: 'The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill'


Excellent write up and compelling reading on how indoor air researchers and aerosol scientists eventually convinced the CDC and WHO risk calculus was wrong in terms of airborne risk, with the help of a graduate history student, who went back into the past to discover the origins of the. Randall uncovered research from William Firth Wells, who was the first to uncover that tuberculosis was an airborne disease in 1962. The 5-micron airborne definition originated from this time period, stemming from a CDC tuberculosis guidance document.

The WHO and the CDC quietly changed their guidance on how Covid may spread at end of April.





https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

One should always be wary of the one maverick who say they all got it wrong. If it were a cold or flu' we just wouldn't care and the enormous resources spent on this area of research would have been far better spent of the still almost blank slate of the pathogenesis of the disease.

WoollyRedHat

is_that_so wrote: »

One should always be wary of the one maverick who say they all got it wrong. If it were a cold or flu' we just wouldn't care and the enormous resources spent on this area of research would have been far better spent of the still almost blank slate of the pathogenesis of the disease.

Not sure if I'm misreading your post, whose POV are you advocating for?

is_that_so

WoollyRedHat wrote: »

Not sure if I'm misreading your post, whose POV are you advocating for?

That we've spent far too much time squabbling over droplet versus aerosol. It does not advance our understanding of what the disease does, which is ultimately more important. Vaccinations, in theory, render all that stuff redundant anyway.

Lumen

is_that_so wrote: »

That we've spent far too much time squabbling over droplet versus aerosol. It does not advance our understanding of what the disease does, which is ultimately more important. Vaccinations, in theory, render all that stuff redundant anyway.

It's critically important to the sequence of safely re-opening society ahead of herd immunity.

is_that_so

Lumen wrote: »

It's critically important to the sequence of safely re-opening society ahead of herd immunity.

For me progress on the disease needs to be as rapid as the race for vaccines but we spend more time with crowd pleasing physics experiments of what the air is doing.

bucketybuck

Klonker wrote: »

NPHET's press conference tomorrow will be interesting.

You don't really expect anybody to ask them some difficult questions, do you?

is_that_so wrote: »

One should always be wary of the one maverick who say they all got it wrong. If it were a cold or flu' we just wouldn't care and the enormous resources spent on this area of research would have been far better spent of the still almost blank slate of the pathogenesis of the disease.

Spot who didn't read the article.

is_that_so

bucketybuck wrote: »

You don't really expect anybody to ask them some difficult questions, do you?



Spot who didn't read the article.

Spot the poster who recognised it as a "been here before" piece and identified the very limited usefulness of such information.

rusty cole

rusty cole wrote: »

if it is interesting, it will be the first one ever!

He's like the nerd who was goaded into posting something by a stunner who'd never look at him otherwise only the stunner is his own ego and the driver is his vanity.. when you see your face every day on the news beside words like hope..saved..critical.. you start to believe that your the one that decides if these things will happen.. that's essentially a god complex, it's why robbie William did so well for the time he did...or a halo effect..just because a person is trustworthy in one regard on general impression, don't believe for one minute that carries through to all areas like their stance on antigen tests for instance..

I've been talking about precisely this concept for many, many months now - and only now we're seeing my ideas become mainstream thinking.

There is no doubt in my mind that, as you say, when the iatric triumvirate of Holohan, Nolan, and Glynn see themselves as the unquestionable saviors of the nation, that this would eventually lead to some form of God complex or, at the very least, extraordinary levels of conceit.

Nolan's tweet exemplifies precisely that attitude. This is not something he would have tweeted at the inception of the pandemic. Fast forward 12-months, though, when he and others in the triumvirate are held up by the media as unquestionable Gods, and watch the ego rise - as it has.

I for one welcome the downfall of Philip Nolan.

I always loathed his 20-minute droning, monotonous lectures at these press briefings, as if he was absorbing as much time as he possibly could. No other jurisdiction has an equivalent of Philip Nolan appearing biweekly with 20-minute statistic lectures. The man basks in the limelight and fawning media attention.

It was only a matter of time before the sword of Damocles fell onto and severed Nolan's reputation.

Now it's time for a swift and convenient resignation to finish him off for good.

WoollyRedHat

is_that_so wrote: »

That we've spent far too much time squabbling over droplet versus aerosol. It does not advance our understanding of what the disease does, which is ultimately more important. Vaccinations, in theory, render all that stuff redundant anyway.

Sorry you're way off the mark there, understanding how disease spreads is fundamental to disease management and control.

crossman47

eskimohunt wrote: »

I've been talking about precisely this concept for many, many months now - and only now we're seeing my ideas become mainstream thinking.

There is no doubt in my mind that, as you say, when the iatric triumvirate of Holohan, Nolan, and Glynn see themselves as the unquestionable saviors of the nation, that this would eventually lead to some form of God complex or, at the very least, extraordinary levels of conceit.

Nolan's tweet exemplifies precisely that attitude. This is not something he would have tweeted at the inception of the pandemic. Fast forward 12-months, though, when he and others in the triumvirate are held up by the media as unquestionable Gods, and watch the ego rise - as it has.

I for one welcome the downfall of Philip Nolan.

I always loathed his 20-minute droning, monotonous lectures at these press briefings, as if he was absorbing as much time as he possibly could. No other jurisdiction has an equivalent of Philip Nolan appearing biweekly with 20-minute statistic lectures. The man basks in the limelight and fawning media attention.

It was only a matter of time before the sword of Damocles fell onto and severed Nolan's reputation.

Now it's time for a swift and convenient resignation to finish him off for good.

You're attacking a man who voluntarily took on an important role that is additional to his regular job so as to help the country. Whatever his faults, I wish to thank him for his efforts.

eigrod

McConkey on Clare Byrne spreading panic about the Indian variant in the UK and how it is infecting vaccinated people. He is a disgrace. You can hear the excitement in his voice because he has a platform to spread his fear and she is barely challenging him either.

Jinglejangle69

Mconkey trying his best to scare people again with variants on RTE 1.

Despite having no evidence.

Jinglejangle69

eigrod wrote: »

McConkey on Clare Byrne spreading panic about the Indian variant in the UK and how it is infecting vaccinated people. He is a disgrace. You can hear the excitement in his voice because he has a platform to spread his fear and she is barely challenging him either.

He's a disgrace.

stephenjmcd

Felt it important to post here for those requiring tests

https://twitter.com/HSELive/status/1393153161351815168?s=20

Jim_Hodge

eskimohunt wrote: »

I've been talking about precisely this concept for many, many months now - and only now we're seeing my ideas become mainstream thinking.
i.

You sure have. But your definition of mainstream is a bit flawed.

crossman47

crossman47 wrote: »

You're attacking a man who voluntarily took on an important role that is additional to his regular job so as to help the country. Whatever his faults, I wish to thank him for his efforts.

he's a philanthropist now then is he??? you think he did it for the altruism? or the money, coverage and prestige???

the Canadian GP fred banting who made one of the largest breakthroughs in medical history was seen to physically attack one of his Nobel prize sharing colleagues based on the sharing of prestige.. He discovered and pioneered insulin.. he had a right to be annoyed but this shows you how even great men can be reduced to basic pride, envy and even violence when the climate is right.

like I said, an expert, not omnipotent.

Boggerman12

eigrod wrote: »

McConkey on Clare Byrne spreading panic about the Indian variant in the UK and how it is infecting vaccinated people. He is a disgrace. You can hear the excitement in his voice because he has a platform to spread his fear and she is barely challenging him either.

The zero COVID fanatics need their 5 mins of infamy

stephenjmcd

All covid testing sites now open to walk ins

https://twitter.com/HSELive/status/1393159161605763076?s=20

stephenjmcd

stephenjmcd wrote: »

All covid testing sites now open to walk ins

https://twitter.com/HSELive/status/1393159161605763076?s=20

HSE have now withdrawn this
https://twitter.com/FergalBowers/status/1393161789081272321?s=20