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

That's the problem with a lot of these numbers being bandied about regarding this pox. They look bad, but when compared to the overall and much bigger numbers they don't look nearly so bad. Covid 19 itself has this problem. When this kicked off and for months afterward we had talk of tens of thousands dead from it, including on this forum and from doctors too. Now aside from understandable panic it quickly became apparent that dying from this pox was almost entirely the remit of the very old or the already chronically sick or the incredibly bloody unlucky. EG the stories of the fit as a butcher's dog 30 year old Ironman athlete that died from it splashed across the media. But as I noted above, here in Ireland ninety percent of ALL covid fatalities were in the over 65's and the over 85's account for forty percent of all fatalities. Even so the vast majority, 99.3 percent of that demographic didn't die from it.

The single biggest issue with this pox was the lackof overflow capacity in our hospitals. That was the case in Italy too, where this pox first really hit home with the harrowing stories coming from there, even though the number of those under forty who died from it in Italy was tiny, less than five in that first wave and each one was terribly sick to start with. This lack of capacity was really evident in somewhere like India, where they were running out of oxygen and basic services unless you were among the wealthy.

IMHO how we end up living with this in actual practical terms is by vaccinating the vulnerable and those who live and deal with them and improving our capacity in the health services. Something looooong overdue in this country. This would also make major inroads into other areas of our health too. Win win. Or we could keep going down the rinse and repeat route of panic, lockdowns, politicans faffing about with their advisor doommongers attention seeking on RTE every night attempting the impossible of putting the genie back in the bottle.

Thanks Rob, though sadly I feel we're on this rinse and repeat cycle for a good while yet. Goverments are large bodies and large bodies move slowly and don't like turning around on a different course when they're dead set on the existing one. This goes double when politics and egos are involved.

And here's a perfect example of revving up the hyperbole and not actually reading what has been written.

I did say:

Now if this were smallpox because of the monumetally serious threat to society I'd be in favour of chucking out hard won personal rights in favour mandatory vaccines, but it isn't. It isn't within an asses bloody roar of something like that. It is in actual demonstrable fact the single least deadly pandemic in world history. In Ireland forty percent of all deaths from covid were in people who were 85 or older. Five years older than the mean age of death for Irish people. That demographic are in the vast majority of cases vaccinated and boosted. As are the vast majority of the immune and health compromised, as are the majority of people over 18 in general. If any of those choose not to be, then tough I say.

Every stat above is an actual hard fact. Not hyperbole about thousands dying. Fact. Those preventable deaths were in the majority of cases in the unvaccinated before the vaccines came along and in the over 65's and even in that demographic 99.3% of the over 65's didn't die from covid. The vast majority of the vulnerable have been vaccinated now, by choice. And it doesn't matter that it's Ireland. Even if we had mandatory vaccination in the morning in the EU(something I would resist with extreme prejudice), we would still have European non EU nations who won't, never mind the rest of the world unless you also want to do a New Zealand two years too late. We'd still have virus reservoirs all around us and given the vaccines are all leaky and only reduce transmission and only do so for a short period of time so we'd be boosting to beat the band every six or less months, while throwing in half arsed and contradictory "circuit breaks" every few months, it's hardly a great solution at all, or good reason to instigate laws which directly affect personal liberty. It has long amazed but not surprised me how quick even the intelligent can be to jump to authoritarianism out of panic.

At no point have I ever come close to suggesting letting the "infection burn through the population", a hyperbolic statement in itself. My position is this as I stated earlier when the seasonal flu vaccine was brought up:

Flu vaccines and the reasons for them are quite different and even there they're primarily aimed at the elderly, immuncompromised and otherwise vulnerable, or those around them like medical staff and carers. They're required in those groups because the virus mutates more and variants are more likely to partially or entirely bypass previous immunity, so tweaked vaccines need to be delivered.

So far the existing vaccines cope with the various covid variants, including it seems omricon. The annual tweaked flu vaccines do little to stamp out the flu seasons every year. People still catch flu on the regular. Plus for the vast majority of people the flu is mild, that is doesn't require hospitalisation and we should be increasing overflow capacity anyway like I suggested for covid, which would help with the flu, pneumonia and similar in the winter months.

As it stands we already live with the influenza virus as IMHO we should with covid, so long as the already vaccinated exhibit asymptomatic or mild symptoms and a massively reduced incidence of serious illness and deaths that impacts our overloaded and under capacity health services. Again it is my opinion and I'd bet the farm virologists would agree with me that we've almost zero chance of making covid 19 extinct by any of the current means at our disposal. It's far more likely to mutate itself into extinction. What we can do and are doing is reducing it to a disease we can live with, by protecting those that need protection and the current vaccines do that, boosters for the vulnerable and long term immune memory responses for the rest of us that reduce the risks of serious illness and death. Hell given the actual real world risks of serious illness and death before vaccines for the under 40's was daftly tiny, if all we did in the future was vaccinate the over 40's and the health compromised we'd have a fair chance of living with this pox. Just like we currently do with influenza.

For me that's a far far better aim than trying and failing - and we will fail IMHO - to wipe it out, or even get close to that. We've wiped out smallpox and we're nearly there with polio, but comparing either of them to covid 19 is for lots of reasons futile.

This is a better plan iMHO than what is being attempted and wouldn't require any hindsight change to our healthcare services at first, nor would it require mandating mass vaccinations. Even if you brought in such a daft law you would still have pockets of resistance to it and the unvaccinated. In Ireland that number would be low enough as we tend to be a servile culture when it comes to authority by our "betters"(Vaccines will be mandatory here by next spring imo. Other nations will show us the way)., but try that in France, or Italy, or Spain. The Latins tend to get uppity about such things, never mind places like Poland or Latvia. IIRC a large chunk of the unvaccinated in Irish hospitals are from EU eastern European nations.