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

The most recent models that NPHET produced were so far off the mark, that it casts a reasonable doubt on any new modelling they come out with.

Modelling is adored by corporate world middle managers. So I'm not shocked a bunch of middle management and academic types in NPHET are flicking their collective bean to the models. Loads of fancy powerpoint slides with arcane maths and funky looking graphs that they can ooh and ahh over projections in endless meetings and claim is how the future will go. It's got all sorts of problems and lies somewhere between may turn out this way and a shell game by modellers who await their cheques, especially in something like a pandemic of a newish pathogen in a different world than existed even a generation ago. While it can look impressive, so can a slick tarot card reader and is about as useful IMHO.

And reality has borne this out. Look at the earliest threads of this pox hereabouts. Of course the very earliest are quite naturally in panic mode with all sorts of horrific projections, but a few months in a few things were becoming pretty clear to anyone who could read and count on their fingers who wasn't having an anxiety attack. IE death rates were much lower than feared. It almost entirely affected in the worst way the very old, the already chronically sick, or the fantastically unlucky and the risk to the under 20's, even the under 40's was minsicule. That spread by droplets was a thing, it wasn't fully airborne and surfaces(remember fomites? For the jargan absorbers. They're stuck with repeating "cohort" ad nauseum nowadays) were less in play than first thought and asymptomatic spread was an issue. All that was known within a few months of this pandemic, but wider panic was still very much in play.

What do we know today? Vaccination works. Antibodies may go down over time and infections can go up, but in the vast majority those infections are mild to asymptomatic because of much longer lasting immune memory. By a large factor when looking at populations those in hospital and ICUs are overrepresented by the non vaccinated and the vaccinated and very ill are more likely to again be the very old or already very sick or the fantastically unlucky. This is also currently holding true for Omricon. Full lockdowns "flatten the curve"(remember that?) work, but are not sustainable economically or psychologically for long. Ditto for doing a New Zealand and closing up entirely(and they had the perfect conditions to do so. We don't).

What doesn't work? Half arsed and contradictory restrictions the likes of which NPHET are pushing in the face of stable serious case numbers and a majority of the population vaccinated. They would have had good reasons this time last year to push restrictions, but didn't and fúcked up and not for the first time, so they're applying what they should have done last year to a very different environment this year.

I hear you 100% on the dementia front. 😔