Relaxation of Restrictions, Part XII *Read OP For Mod Warnings*

NPHET to me were fundamental in getting through this but like the rest of us haven't always come up with the right type of thinking about things. Having a non-statutory body, with virtually the same members, functioning for the best part of two years is not a good thing.

NPHET have a very mixed scorecard.  The highs are unquestionably their unflappable calm in Spring and Summer last year and also a welcome determination to steady the ship in the bad times of last Winter.

Messaging and their stance on antigen testing are definitely the lows. There's  something almost schizophrenic about them in the way they flip from stark disciplinarians to hand holding buddies.

Equally damning is how they lost their way from being a purely advisory body to one that effectively controlled every action of government.  At times that was necessary, but there are key points during this where it was all about NPHET and almost an insistence that their advice be implemented. Having a worrywart like Martin and the completely ineffectual Donnelly in place meant they were likely to prevail almost all the time.

Their modelling has been discussed extensively on this site but it is clear that it's not a particularly helpful tool in the way that they project. Nobody expects perfection but close to the ballpark makes them useful. That said, I think their decision making has also fallen victim to the models, to the extent that they're not even prepared to project lower levels of infection.

Finally, we have the almost pointless recommendations over the last month or so, the latest scraping the barrel on pettiness. As with their models, they continue to obsess about daily cases and while they are high they are no longer translating into large numbers of hospitalizations. this is down to a combination of oodles of kids getting COVID and boosters taking effect through the age groups.

If we ever end up in a scenario we need to produce a NPHET again there are lessons in all of this. 

Forgive me if I'm mistaking you for another poster...but have you had a rapid change of opinion in the past week or so?

I just saw an RTE article reporting that "Thousands attend Dublin protest over Covid measures".

It's like upside-down world.

While the tone of the article is welcome, the use of that sort of image still suggests that the media want to protray the protests a being a group of anti vax nutters.

I was thinking the same...

Ah right. You think the new variant is just a ploy to encourage people to get a booster?

That poster doesn't give a toss about anyone else.

Sending vaccines to Africa would save far more lives than pumping them into kids in Ireland.

He/she will be safer when coming into contact with kids once they are vaccinated, who cares about poorer countries.

All in this together.

Ireland hasn't been taking it's excess supply of vaccines, some of these have been going to COVAX, however, for Africa specifically the issue has been more of logistics and hesitancy, the supply is now there for them but it will still be used very slow (and part of it is down to lack of threat from SARS-COV2 due to a lower average age). It makes no logistic sense for Ireland to send any of the vaccines we have in storage to Africa (there is a lot of bureaucracy around medicines as we saw when buying from Romania), they will be coming directly from the manufacturers instead. Africa doesn't just need vaccines, it needs supply chains to store and distribute them (and leaders to both encourage usage of them and not play politics with them, there has been a huge amount of waste because of this).

There is also multiple vaccines available that we aren't using, Novavax is now approved in Indonesia, India is producing it's own vaccines as is Cuba.

I'd really like to know what they're worried about, hospital numbers are falling, cases have stabilised, boosters continually being done, and a new variant that doesn't appear to be much concern based on early data.

Calm yourself down, as usual you jump to conclusions. Likely to be international travel related if anything in my opinion, such as PCR tests required etc. Let's wait and see before jumping to conclusions