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

Were you admitted or showing symptoms of Covid19?

If not I see no reason you should be tested.

The announcement is a bit of a surprise but what would they be doing now that the emergency is all but over.

Anyone else not really believing this? Or like that on September 20th there will be significant changes? I am just so used to bad news I can’t quite believe/see it....I just feel like something else will happen in next or two....

There was never any point in Nphet at any given time.

Likely a political stunt and good chance they will change their mind. Ridiculous to mention a date. They need to use targets such as hospital numbers, vaccination progress or infection numbers.

Hope you right :)

Of course there was, comments like these are hilarious!

You might not always like the decision but in a pandemic you absolutely do need the input of virologists and epidemiologists and medical knowledge. Otherwise we would be depending on unqualified TDs to make decisions who could be a publican or a teacher . Yes NPHET had a role and we needed that expert knowledge

The only expert knowledge Nphet provided us with was expert knowledge of endless lockdowns. Nothing else.

That's completely incorrect and you know it, not the biggest fan of Nphet but of course they were needed, are you just spewing nonsense for likes or something or are you really that uninformed?

NPHET consistently used the bluntest tools available to steer us through this. At no point did they ever offer creative solutions that indicated that they had any trust in the public.

My personal opinion here of course but I always got the impression that they didn’t have a high opinion of the majority of the people in the country. Some would perhaps just see this as simply an abundance of caution.

Their lack of trust in the public manifested itself in the primary use of fear as a tool to ensure compliance. For me this is where a line was crossed. We had the state broadcaster working with NPHET and advocacy groups to shift the Overton window in an attempt to shape and create boundary’s of acceptable discourse and public opinion.

I think Ireland is somewhat of an outlier in Europe. We were the only country airing daily briefings to announce cases and deaths for long periods during the pandemic. We even had a special guest at one of the briefings. A doctor who had a bad case of Covid and lived to recount his harrowing tale. We had a CMO using his personal Twitter account to express his disgust at people socialising outdoors resulting in police baton charges 24 hours later. We absolutely crippled the hospitality industry far more than was necessary in my opinion.

I’m all too aware that a huge proportion of the public and indeed posters here had no issues with how this was managed and I’ve no interest in getting into a back and forth about it but I would hope that a time will come where some questions can be publicly put to the government, NPHET and the state broadcaster.

It’s not over. They need to get started on boosters before we have a problem. If we do that the impact of covid this winter could be very small. If we hold off we could end up with NPHET being back and more restrictions.

one thing we should have learned from the pandemic is not to ignore what is going on in other countries. If Israel and the US are going for boosters you can be damn sure we need to get cracking with them also.