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

So you're completely wrong here, zero chance of you admitting it though. It's a worry how easily people are taken in by things they wish to be true.

He's not very good at hiding from Cruel "I'm just asking questions" Summer.

I would note that a plan to strip you of civil liberties for any other reason than to save lives and prevent the spread of a disease in a pandemic, is a conspiracy theory, so you may need to word that piece better.

Civil liberties are taken away (smoking ban) and added to (same sex marriage) all the time, in this case, during a pandemic, they were taken away, pandemics can take 5 or more years to work through, with vaccines and treatments we may be able to make that shorter, but there is no guarantee of that. But as you say, some people hate not being in control and have been raging against any restrictions and declaring it false (in whatever way that may be) since the first day of the first lockdown.

The smoking ban was the best thing to happen in Ireland and we have MM to thank for that when he was health minister in the 00s.

IMO the smoking ban should be updated to ban smoking near door ways now and have designated smoking grounds in towns and cities instead of at doorways outside.

Our place has stated not to come to work if you have any slight form of cold/sniffles but people I work with seriously struggle with p!ssing in a toilet bowl so I don't think it's going to be followed.

Hi Astro who doesn’t back up his claims with evidence. France have just extended their ‘health pass’ to only people with boosters. Where is your evidence that this will not happen here or that they will drop any restrictions in Spring?

As for Newsom - what terrible excuses they’ve conjured up. ‘My kids had an intervention and stopped me travelling to COP 26…’ - wow. People are seriously gullible or else they just want this to be true very badly.

And yes @Goldengirl I’ve lost trust at this point in time in what is being asked of the population. Nowhere at any stage did I agree that we could shut people out of society in the name of a pass they are soon going to disable to force boosters. Nowhere did I agree that they could keep threatening the population to ‘do more’ after a 92% uptake in the vaccination programme because their health service is absolutely crap & they didn’t increase its capacity despite throwing billions away to have people sitting at home. This has gone way too far.

It is a surprise finding that an unvaccinated person, and a vaccinated person, are at the same risk of getting C19 when exposed to an infected vaccinated person for any length of time. It is furthermore surprising that a vaccinated person is at the same risk of infection from both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The household is irrelevant. It's relevant in that it's a great testbed for wider inferences. I.e. it's strong evidence that covid certs make no sense now.

The most obvious counterpoint to yours, is that the same study showed a marginally higher risk for unvaccinated people infecting unvaccinated people, therefore the same study showed a positive effect from vaccination, despite everybody being in households.

They said they had a cold. It's not that difficult to follow the HSE guidelines and stay at home with symptoms. HSE guidelines saying covid can feel like a cold. So that suggests that anyone with a cold should stay at home.

Another jump in hospitals this morning, now 551.

Yeah that's right, when unvaccinated people infected unvaccinated people. I'm not sure that this metric is really relevant anymore, except as a posthoc validation of what the spread might have been without vaccination.

It's good to know that relatively unvaccinated countries (e.g. eastern Europe) can reduce a lot of spread by pushing vaccinations, the studies, of course, weren't done for the benefit of Ireland. Also a sign of what might happen as the 5-11 year old rollout begins.

What would be beneficial is reducing the strain on hospitalisations and ICU by getting more and more people jabbed even though breaking through to the last 10% of people is hardest due to intransigent beliefs.