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

It's in the Indo but it might be true anyway. 😀

I do wonder whether people might have travelled over the border to get vaxxed.

Pathetic comment that says a lot about some attitudes in here. That "Piss poor" vaccination uptake is still over 80%, past that magic point that was once considered to be herd immunity.

Vaccination rates are superb across all of Ireland and still people want to talk about anti vaxxers and lie about piss poor uptake, I guess finding a boogyman to blame is easier than acknowledging that the vaccination program is sufficiently completed and that we should already be moving onto the next phase, not clinging to it for another couple of months as an easy excuse.

Triggered much?

I'm not clinging to anything and am in favour of fully opening up.

My "motives", if you want to frame it like that, are for society to fully open up and the disease level to reduce.

If there was better vaccine coverage in Donegal then they probably wouldn't have three times the national covid rate.

What are your "motives"?

Todays stats are in already, I can't link yet but suffice to say groundhog day

Very little increase in hospitalisations over the weekend.

62 less in hospital than this time last week

Yes I said it's pathetic to blame the UK. It is, we're 18 months into this and any time we have a spike the best reasoning we can come up with is the UK. At best you could say it hurts the border counties, but our case numbers have been high across the country for several months now. Putting that on being beside the UK is lazy, and we haven't been given any sort of explanation from the HSE/NPHET as to why we've been so much higher than the rest of Europe.

Exactly .

Not blaming spikes on UK but it is the area we are adjacent to and have most contact with along with other countries in Western Europe . Portugal and Spain by the way had more contact with UK via tourism when Delta started to spread and they had their wave before us.

But don't mention the UK .....

This line of thinking is totally nonsensical - if cases go down, its because of those extra few vaccines administered, if they go up its because we havent administered enough. Sounds all well and good until you look at data from around the world - vaccines dont put an end to any waves of infection, that happens on its own.

Israel, Iceland, Belgium all saw cases spike long after high vaccinations, and actually going back even further - before vaccinations, we saw waves of the virus rise and fall - the exact same thing is happening here. Vaccines prevent hospitalisations from being as high (10% or less of non-vax number), but they do not stop the trend (rise and fall).

What we are seeing now is the fall of this delta wave. We have long hit diminishing returns on vaccination rollout in this country.

"I live beside an industrial waste processing plant that sometimes releases up to 100,000 litres of contaminated water into the local river, where I get my drinking water from. I have set up every filtration mechanism I can get my hands on, yet on these days the quality of my water drops massively. You don't think the two could be linked, do you?"

Scale matters, Adam. The UK has 14 times the amount of people that we do and we share a completely uncontrolled border. When they flood us with sh1te, we can't put up flood defences, we can only wear waterproof gear and hope that we're not badly affected.

The UK has been an absolute sh1tshow throughout this pandemic, and by circumstance we've been dragged along by them. It's not lazy to blame the UK, it's fact. They have one of the worst infections and deaths records on the planet, a direct result of the "let the bodies pile high" Tory attitude. So by consequence, we are exposed to that. Politically, the government are unwilling to point fingers and cause conflict, but the dogs on the street know that this is why our case rates have been so consistently high despite our strong restrictions.

Our strong restrictions are the only thing that have protected us in any way from the Tory sh1tshow.

Until vaccination that is. Now cases are still on the rise in the UK and finally we're seeing ours come down. Because our vax rates are that much higher than theirs.

@timmyntc wrote:

The vaccination rollout has stalled in a number of areas well short of potential, and some of those areas are suffering particularly large numbers of cases.

It's difficult to seperate the factors (vaccine hesitancy, promixity to the UK where restrictions are lower, ignoring social distancing/mask wearing etc), so I don't know how you can be so confident that the one correlated factor (low vaccine take up) isn't responsible.

Most cases are in young people, young people have lower vaccine coverage. If we care about cases (I'm not sure I do, particularly, but public health seem to) it seems sensible to try to raise vaccine coverage in a group that where there's most transmission.

There is no other country in Europe that has a border like ours. You can't even call it a "soft" border. Ireland is for all intents and purposes a single jurisdiction when it comes to movement of people. We are not an island separated by a border. Ian Paisley Sr. even said it himself; "Our people are British but our cattle are Irish". When foot & mouth was around, we instituted border controls between the island of Ireland and the island of Britain. Because everyone knew that was the only way to control infection.

This time around, Northern Ireland refused to institute border controls between Ireland and Britain, thereby meaning that there was no border of any kind between the two jurisidictions.

This is in contrast to the rest of Europe (and almost the rest of the world) where formal, controllable borders exist between jurisdictions. German police can stand at the border and turn people around. Gardai & PSNI can't.

For the love of god don’t tell this woman that testing will hopefully be scaled back!!! She’ll have a banger!!