Will there be another lockdown?

They evidentially do work. Despite the fact that we are effectively fully open and loads of people are ignoring other basic precautions, neither our daily case numbers nor our hospital numbers are at the peak of last Jan which happened when most people were still restricting movements and was caused by people socialising a little bit over the Christmas

So the government are yet again ignoring the elephant in the room and making pikachu faces about where the increase in cases is coming from.

Here's an idea - circuit break the schools until January, remote learning from now until after Xmas. The dog on the street knows that schools are contributing massively to this wave, so instead of driving nightclubbers or pub goers back to house parties with stupid curfews, lets see them tackle the one area they point blank refuse to admit is a problem despite it being a blatantly obvious one.

People keep saying this but it would only be contributing to the government’s whack-a-mole approach, not dealing with it. We need to stop f**king around with schools. If nothing else, at the very least let the children have their education and their friends and let’s stop dragging them, our most fragile citizens, any further into this dystopian mess.

We just need to stop f**king about with stuff just to be seen to have taken action — whether it’s schools or some poorly conceived idea about hospitality curfews. The reality we all need to face is that Covid is here forever, vaccines will not prevent transmission, and only by actually facing Covid and accepting the reality that it will spread are we we going to reach a stage (aided massively by the effect of vaccination on severity of illness) where the virus becomes a progressively lesser risk. The old arguments of 2020 are dead — the “let it rip” mantra used to demonise the advocates of a more holistic approach is buried. We are in the era of vaccines and there is nothing for it now but to face reality and stop the can kicking.

If they were invisible it'd be less of a problem, kept themselves to themselves, but they aren't or there wouldn't be such disproportionate numbers of them in hospital and ICU.

Wise words Kermit.

"The schools are safe" is the "I don't accept that" of our time.

The whole thing is a logic blackhole, I don't understand anyone who can trot out the "schools are safe" line with a straight face.

1) Children are less likely to have symptoms - that's great, it's still a highly infectious virus they can transmit at home. Little Timmy picks it up off his classmate.

2) Now the child has Covid without symptoms, but he's passed it to the rest of the household. Mam & Dad now go off to work and infect X amount of people in their workplace.

3) Coworkers now have it, bring it home, their son goes to school, infect X amount in his class and the cycle continues.

Schools are not safe, they are petri dishes for the continues spread of this and politicians or NPHET stating the opposite repeatedly is not going to change that fact.

I think booster uptake will slow significantly from the original vaccine uptake levels. A lot of scepticism creeping in with people in my personal life. Anyone else noticed this trend.

About the effectiveness of the vaccine. Think another lockdown of any great significance would have a big impact on people’s belief in it. Most people do not educate themselves to the degree the people analysing Covid on these forums do.

We cannot live with Covid if we are taking the view that the most fundamentally normal parts of life, including children being able to go to school and having physical interaction with their friends, are forever subject (at almost a whim) to being targeted for the potential for this virus to spread. If we are talking about heads being in the sand, it’s hard to evade the point that we are fast approaching two years of restrictions . Lockdowns and the draconian curtailment of certain liberties was only meant to be, and only can be, a temporary feature. Even the half-life of freedoms being reinstated but constantly and incessantly threatened by the reality that those things can be stripped away at the drop of the hat, is neither a good nor a sustainable policy. We can’t run an education system on this basis and it is not in the national interest to force our children to play this unending Hokey Cokey in their formative years.

We need to stop the tinkering and understand that if vaccines aren’t going to stop transmission we need to accept the reality of transmission and find a more sustainable way forward which involves a Living with Covid strategy that actually means living with it — not forever trying to find ways to avoid living with it.

I wonder do those people understand that the significant number is not the rate of infection, it is the rate of admission to hospitals and mortality. Both of which are down due to vaccination. And do they understand that 52% of ICU patients come from the 8% of the population who are unvaccinated? Let’s hope so.