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

40,000 people so 800 odd cases in there. That's crazy. Would be an interesting test case to distribute antigen tests to everyone in that area

Should we just dig a big trench north of the N14?

Prime Time now trying to spread fear. Cases numbers mean absolutelty nothing without deaths and ICU admissions, that's why we have vaccines.

Not a single country in the entire world that has rolled out a successful vaccine program has experienced a surge in deaths and ICU numbers, are we somehow specialists in failure?

RTE have given undue weight to these extremists over the last year, particularly since late last summer, and that has had direct impacts on viewers' mental health. I know ISAG's piece on the future of concerts and festivals completely f*cked me up, and I know I'm not the only one just in my own social circle either. The leaks earlier this year proved that RTE were in direct contact with this lobby / pressure group and inviting them to author pieces for "current affairs" programming - not just to come on and be interviewed, but to actually perform role-play sketches indicating what the post-pandemic future would look like. Off the top of my head, I remember the hairdresser, the pub, the festival, and the Christmas dinner - we know that the latter was authored by ISAG after a direct invite from RTE with reference to previous successes, which one can infer means that all four sketches were authored by the same group.

"Previous successes" obviously means that they got a huge amount of traction on social media, primarily because they depressed the sh!t out of so many people and those people shared the clips aghast at the suggestion that this was what life would become. At no point did RTE ever disclose that these pieces for current affairs programmes (Claire Byrne in particular) were authored by a lobby group whose modus operandi was to psychologically manipulate the public into backing a particular anti-COVID strategy.

It may come across as hyperbole but I cannot stress enough the spiral of absolute despair that festival piece, presented as an impartial current affairs piece, sent me into. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it pushed me to the brink of a dark abyss I had managed to steer clear of since my only ever brush with it in 2011, and I ended up writing a blog post to that effect in the hopes of showing others that they weren't alone if they happened to be feeling that way.

I'm no COVID denier, my father was in one of the highest categories of risk and as such we as a family had been coccooning since *before* the government even advised social distancing (his doctor got wind of the incoming pandemic and advised him to get out ahead of it as he would be a 99% certainty to end up in the ICU if he contracted it, even a seasonal flu knocks him out for weeks on end) and I have nothing but respect for the media coming from a family of journalists. But RTE's cosy relationship with ISAG and their constant failure to point out that ISAG is a pressure / lobby group with a specific agenda, is a complete and utter betrayal of their public service broadcasting remit. To use ISAG's self-title without clarifying what the group actually is, is akin to referring to "The Iona Institute" without pointing out that it is in no way any kind of officially-connected organisation but an entirely private, agenda driven lobby group.

Tl;dr, ISAG are a group of extremists who have been intentionally manipulating the public's psyches through social engineering, and RTE has facilitated this apparently without a moment's hesitation. That is not ok, no matter who's side you happen to be on. A public service broadcaster should not be in cahoots with a political lobby group and allowing them to script current affairs segments without disclosing this to the public.

Would you think there'd be that many though?

Was at a MVC today twice, morning and evening, and I saw lines of hundreds of young people queuing for their first shot of mRNA. Can't imagine it would be much different any other place.

I don't think it's a smart thing to do but a positive swab is the quickest route to vaccine passport. Register today for a first shot in two to four weeks time followed by a second four weeks later and a further two weeks wait.

@lee_baby_simms wrote:

There's no such thing as a vaccine passport. If you mean the restriction of access to indoor hospitality to the vaccinated, at this point that's a reasonable health measure to partially protect staff who haven't had a chance to get vaccinated yet, similar to the way we restrict smoking in public places to outdoors.

If it goes on past mid-Sept (the point at which all consenting adults will be fully vaccinated) that's another matter though.

So with this delta variant 'rebound' - are the vaccines a waste of time??

look at the UK numbers have hit the roof🤔

@seamus wrote

Vaccinations and restrictions. Remember that the UK Delta wave kicked off immediately after re-opening of indoor stuff on May 17th, at which point they were only 30% fully vaxxed.

The recent good weather might have helped us too.

One neat idea is that the required one-dose vaccination rate to tame the virus pre-Delta (low to mid-50s% for UK and Israel) is now the required two-dose vaccination rate with Delta. A number of countries are approaching that 50-something-%-fully-vaxxed rate now.

The next two weeks are crucial, LOL.

It did it Canada . They locked down the town and people stayed in and the whole town had two doses within four weeks . They also allowed no visitors and no one out . It happened in a large ski resorrt where people from cities were bringing covid in so the stopped all in coming traffic for 6 weeks

now I am aware that is most likely would not work in Donegal as towns merge into each other . In Canada towns can be an hour or two drive away