Will there be another lockdown?

Notify everyone in the country that vaccination is required for hospital care. No vaccination - no health care ( pay for it yourself ).

Don't take health advice ? - then you don't get health care !

Does this apply to just covid or in general. Why are smokers clogging up the hospital system or alcohol related care, if someone crashes and they were speeding should we refuse to treat them, they were breaking the law.

I was engaging with the point that there's no point getting a vaccine if it does nothing to protect those around you.

Yes, it's important to note that even if vaccinated you can still get infected and infect but someone else. But at a macro level, how likely that happens is different.

I have shown that it does help to protect those around you, with reference to evidence you are unwilling or unable to challenge other than with remarks about someone's post count. So yeah, I'm sticking to my point.

Other factor is the way that most of the Irish state simply went into shutdown rather than making any effort to keep things ticking over. INIS holding onto GNIB cards and passports for months resulting in rescinded job offers was a major bugbear of mine.

That is not correct. Everyone in the know use phrase: There was 2/3 (or 70%) of unvaccinated in ICU "at one stage". That mean there probably was a short time or a moment when this happened however "at one stage" become very interesting point as it allows them to browbeat dumb public into scary stories about how unvaccinated are driving current surge.

Nothing is further from the truth yet then you have the likes of Pat K who is having a stroke on the radio constantly going on about selfishness, helping others and how opening of schools is going to doom us.

thisNew scientist article says you're much less likely to spread the virus if you're vaccinated

From the article "They absolutely do reduce transmission,” says Christopher Byron Brooke at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Vaccinated people do transmit the virus in some cases, but the data are super crystal-clear that the risk of transmission for a vaccinated individual is much, much lower than for an unvaccinated individual.”

A recent study found that vaccinated people infected with the delta variant are 63 per cent less likely to infect people who are unvaccinated."

This article agrees but says the protective effect wanes dramatically after 3 months of vaccination.

Whatever way you slice it, it's hard to argue that vaccination doesn't reduce transmission.

I don't claim to be an expert. I just did a quick Google.

The summer of 2020 was the government squandering goodwill and this I believe to be partly responsible for the complete disregard for caution seen over xmas. As for learning lessons to me it looks like the government is once again farting around, and this is pretty much why Mistletown Dublin got cancelled.

Yeh some will. But most won't thankfully. Imagine being told you can't go more than 5km away from your house even when you are fully vaccinated. Crazy stuff. If that were to happen then you'd have to start giving some credit to the conspiracy theories.

Some people didn't. But there will always be some people who break the laws in any circumstance. That's why we have a whole justice system. Most people more or less stuck to he rules during the lockdowns. You can rely on most people sticking to the rules in normal circumstances too, it's the basis of society.

if there's need for more restrictions after Christmas then most people will behave well. Some people can't be trusted to behave well but its not a reason to not have rules just because some people won't follow them.

Its crazy how scared we have become of everything

100 year ago people just to on with life no matter what and there was things like Small pox, Plague, Spanish flu, all far more deadly than Covid,

We really are a planet full of babies,

There comes a time people have to live & if old or venerable people die then we just have to accept it that's the way nature & life has always been ,

If small pox is a far more deadly disease than covid, why isn't it still killing loads of people today? Or plague?

Strange isn't it... covid is still going around killing people despite all the medicines and healthcare systems of 2021.

So small pox claimed more lives, as did plague, but in the environment of 2021, covid is actually more deadly.

100 years ago people just had to accept that lots of babies wouldn't survive, or young children. Men in the prime of their life could fall like poppies in the trenches, women in the prime of their life could die in childbirth. A long active retirement was the privilege of the few not the many. A scratch could get infected and kill you pre antibiotics. You had to be very accepting of death around you whether you liked it or not because it was a constant companion. They had no choice to get on with life - well, that's if they were one of the lucky ones to still be alive, and a lot weren't.

This crisis has never really been about the deaths of the people who have sadly died despite having treatment available in modern healthcare facilities. It's about the people who pulled through because ICU was there to save them. And that isn't just people over 80 but people with decades of life expectancy.

What's at stake in this crisis has never really been about the very vulnerable such as those in nursing homes. It has been about protecting the healthcare systems (which did not exist 100 years) from being overwhelmed, and still being able to serve its purpose.