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

is_that_so

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035268#Comment_118035268

If very few people require hospitalisation it is mild and you manage the recovery yourself. How exactly did a car crash become an illness now?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035259#Comment_118035259

Last year we had 0% vaccinated and the hospitals were ok. Difficult in the ICU units in Jan but we were never in any real danger.

Now we have 92% vaccinated.

seamus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035197#Comment_118035197

You seem to be labouring under the false impression that our hospital system ticks along just fine normally.

If we open up now, our hospitals and ICUs will fill up with people suffering from respiratory illness. A&Es will be stretched, hospitals will have to activate surge capacities, people asked to stay away from A&Es unless they're very ill.

In other words a *perfectly normal winter in the Irish hospital system*.

Just because this time around restrictions are an option, doesn't mean it's ok to put them in place. Emergency powers exist to deal with the extraordinary. Using them to tackle business as usual problems is executive overreach.

If in winter 2019, they had proposed closing nightclubs, limiting numbers in pubs and restaurants to protect the hospitals, it would have been an outrage. This is no different. Luckily flu levels in the community are zero right now so we're unlikely to see much of a flu season till the tail end of winter.

bucketybuck

A lot of you seem to be missing the point to a certain extent.

Yes we all know hospitals were always struggling and overcrowded in winter, for as long as I can remember. Yes I absolutely think we should have fully reopened months ago and still should reopen fully today. Those two points are obvious to my mind.

But they were just as obvious last year and look what happened. I have been saying this for over 6 months now, that come the winter and with hospitalisations rising and hospitals close to collapse, what will the NPHET government do?

For 18 months they have acted one way, why on earth do people think that all of a sudden they are going to do a 180 and let the hospitals sink or swim?

Still nobody asks themselves the obvious question, why did they set a reopening date that was 2 months away? Why pick a date that is right at the start of the winter flu season? Why chose this date when there was always, always going to be rising cases at this time?

SupplyandDemandZone

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035070#Comment_118035070

I'm not going back to any basics tbh. Covid is over for me and mine. We've played our part. 3 of my family including myself have had Covid and guess what we survived. This virus is not dangerous for healthy people despite the spin We've got vaccinated, we've stayed within the 2klms nonsense, cancelled last Xmas literally done nothing except see people for 10 minutes in their gardens, didn't travel abroad until this August, wore masks at all indoor settings, i worked throughout the whole pandemic as did my wife not from home etc.. etc... etc...

Covid is here forever. We will never have as high a number of vaccinated as we do right now at this moment of time and any step backwards is unacceptable to me. Give the old and vulnerable the boosters and let the world go on.

mohawk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035028#Comment_118035028

What it means in the real world to anyone with half a brain is that one hospital in the region with 24 hour Emergency Department is not enough. There has been a huge increase in patients in the ED recently (compared to 2019) who then need a bed. This means that there are no beds for surgical patients. No other hospital in the region performs complex surgeries. Nenagh, Ennis and St Johns are predominantly day case surgical procedures. None of this will be mentioned by the media of course because it’s clear that the government and the HSE are not going to acknowledge that the issues facing the health system are caused by their incompetence.

If other countries manage to get through the winter without increasing restrictions then we could be in big trouble economy wise if we have to increase restrictions.

marno21

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035302#Comment_118035302

The last paragraph here is very important. The Delta variant of Covid has an R0 higher than the UK variant we had last summer and we haven’t seen how Delta behaves in winter. If it’s got an R0 of 5-8 it’ll absolutely rip through the country this winter even if we close pubs at 11:30pm. There is little point in trying to contain it, but if the peak gets delayed you may be pushing the peak til later in the winter when flu may have been reintroduced to the country via international travel around Xmas.

It may be time to stop preventing the inevitable and just accepting reality now and letting us get back to normal.

bucketybuck

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035302#Comment_118035302

"Just because this time around restrictions are an option, doesn't mean it's ok to put them in place."

Why not? The precedent is now there so why are they not an option to protect the vulnerable?

In my opinion it was never ok to use most of the restrictions so "ok" isn't really the metric here.

You appear to be intelligent so please, explain why the overton window has not shifted regarding the use of restrictions?

Jimi H

How do people see this playing out? No matter what the decision this week it seems the numbers are going to rise regardless.

I’m assuming more blame will be heaped on the unvaccinated over the coming months. Will boosters be rolled out to everyone to combat the waning effectiveness of the vaccines?

Am I incorrect to think the vaccines won’t stop the virus and we’re all going to get infected at some point with or without vaccination?

SupplyandDemandZone

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035180#Comment_118035180

This is a mild illness in the vast vast majority of people. I know at least 15 people who have had it and the one that passed away was 87 years of age with a heart condition the others brushed it off at home within a few days including 3 of my family myself included. Covid has been blown out of all proportion and the wheeling out of the very very rare case of a younger person passing away with it is a staple now of the media.

We indeed have a health crisis in this country and it occurs every year at this time until February and it's the fault of the government and HSE who have failed to fix the health system and frankly ridiculous trolley situation. We also have a mental health crisis that any more rowing back on opening up will make worse.

seamus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035340#Comment_118035340

We've had this discussion already. Restrictions are fine when there's an extraordinary threat. Once that's gone, they're not.

I have no idea what an "overton window" is.

PTH2009

Tony is going to be concerned very concerned even borderline very very concerned

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035376#Comment_118035376

The only time there was an extraordinary threat was in early 2020. Back when we didn't know what we were dealing with and we thought we might potentially have a 6 figure death toll.

Once we entered May 2020 it was already clear that Covid was thankfully much more mild than anticipated. It was at this point that freedoms should have been returned and all the focus switched to how we could help the hospitals cope. (Increasing surge capacity etc).

Sadly it seems that restrictions are the shiny new tool that we can use instead of actually focusing on the health service.

lee_baby_simms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035376#Comment_118035376

Allow lively debate within a predefined narrow spectrum of acceptable opinion in order to influence opinion and policy.

bucketybuck

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035376#Comment_118035376

You could google the phrase in 2 seconds if you wanted, I suspect you know full well what it is.

Just like I suspect you don't want this discussion because it is an awkward one, you know full well restrictions are not justified but you don't want to acknowledge it. Because if they are not justified now then they weren't justified previously, and you defended them previously.

hynesie08

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035406#Comment_118035406

Maybe you could give him some tips to relax, since you're so calm and rational.

PTH2009

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035501#Comment_118035501

Like half the nation later on when lockdown is recommended

When will our esteemed public health officials start leaking and going on the radio with their ‘concerns/reset’ narrative?

Also, have to laugh at the hopes antigen testing will be used. Whether it would work or not in a wider setting remains to be seen, but unfortunately that ship sailed when Lecturer Nolan tweeted his snake oil diatribe. They’ll never go back on that as credibility would be shot. And an academic doesn’t like to have their credibility questioned.

PTH2009

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035501#Comment_118035501

Like half the nation later on when lockdown is recommended

hynesie08

Saying it twice won't make it come true.

namloc1980

Hard to believe that only a few short weeks ago we were told that NPHET would be stood down in mid October.

HalfAndHalf

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118033583#Comment_118033583

How did you work that out?

2000 cases here is the equivalent of 28,000 cases in the U.K. at a per capita of x14 (5mil here to 68mil there)

If anything over the past few weeks we’ve been practically the same as the U.K. and yet they’re near enough completely open and we’re now talking of delaying some more opening.

The Nal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035678#Comment_118035678

Well we're running out of ICU beds. And its 18c out there today. Grim winter ahead lads.

FintanMcluskey

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035302#Comment_118035302

If we open up now, our hospitals and ICUs will fill up with people suffering from respiratory illness. A&Es will be stretched, hospitals will have to activate surge capacities, people asked to stay away from A&Es unless they're very ill.

In other words a *perfectly normal winter in the Irish hospital system*.

A very pragmatic summary which I completely agree with Seamus

The only problem is, we've already acquiesced to relinquishing freedom to protect health services for the past 18 months, so now something has to change drastically

It took something extraordinary to implement those measures, and its going to take something even more extraordinary to get them back.

NPHET were going to disband by mid October, wonder how that's going?

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/nphet-to-disband-in-october-as-employees-expected-to-return-to-office-from-september-40795801.html

You can say Im an idiot or whatever you want, but the so called idiots on this thread have usually called it most accurate

JRant

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035262#Comment_118035262

Unfortunately for all of us the HSE decided to ignore it's own reports stating the need to significantly increase ICU capacity over a decade ago.

The pandemic had nothing to do with their inability to increase ICU capacity over the past 10 years.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035570#Comment_118035570

Re Antigen tests. You cannot wave something like that off as saying the science is sketchy, or actually you can only in Ireland.

Since we are following science, you have to state what you're concerns are and point out the science that doesn't add up.

You would think with lives and livelihoods on the line, media would ask this. The fact they are being used elsewhere tells us everything we need to know.

This issue has no basis in fact, I take huge issue with this. It smacks of profiteering or somebody enriching themselves from this part of the equation.

Best to hire PR consultants and point the way to the pat kenny show.

iamwhoiam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035780#Comment_118035780

Absolutely .It was flagged by nursing unions , consultants and nothing was done .Long before Covid struck the bed and ICU capacity is falling way too short for the population

Nyero

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035501#Comment_118035501

Tell him to go to a nightclub and leer at young ones.

JRant

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118035875#Comment_118035875

Indeed, I remember the head of the Irish consultants organization stated at the start of this pandemic that our ICUs are almost always maxed out with no buffer at all. He clearly stated then that any increase in ICU admissions was going to impact.

Nyero

THE next 24 hours will be crucial

Just lifted that from the indo., whatever happened to 2 weeks crucial😁