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

But it does lower your chances of being infected or pass it on. It does not eliminate this chance, but does lower it. If you're going on a big rant at least get the simplest facts right.

Unvaccinated still taking up a disproportionate amount of hospital beds, hence the continued and increasing restrictions on them until that drops to 1:1 or restrictions are gone altogether.

I don’t know? I was told that these vaccines were 100% effective against preventing hospitalisations and death. This turned out to be incorrect.

The same people are saying it lowers your chances of getting it and transmitting it, but again, I think even that claim doesn’t look as concrete as it once was.

And even if it does lower your chances of catching it and transmitting it, how much does it lower it by? 0.01%, 0.5%, 20%, 40%??

We’ve what, 94% of the population vaccinated and yet we have 4k plus new cases everyday for over a month now if not longer? They’re all not unvaccinated.

Oh I don't doubt that, but to suggest the vaccines don't lower your chances of infection or transmission seems a little disingenuous. No vaccine has ever been 100% at anything as far as I know, but surely if it didn't lower the chances of infection we'd have a lot more than 4k cases a day given everything is open. We were higher than that in January with everything closed.

so the plan is to get through this winter and repeat the same next year?

So as i said no plan to actually live with COVID.

Vaccines are the way forward for next year like they were for this year. Good plan!

Get your vaccine to get life back to normality, opps sorry that didn’t work, more restrictions but take the vaccine again to get life back to normal, opps that didn’t work more restrictions…..

Thats the plan??

All the lads making money off the virus. I like the part about Europe helping to create variants by blocking poor countries from creating vaccine.

And then talk of making it mandatory.

Its all rotten at this stage.

No, it is the same change for everyone.

The teachers who are out isolating are household contacts of their own families.

What I was saying is that I think (careful now, I'm not saying it is fact, it is what I think) the masking of children has come up since transmission rates amongst them is high. I know that they don't suffer badly from Covid, but if they are the age group that are transmitting it most AND we have the household contact rule running at the same time, then maybe the idea was that if we could reduce the amount of transmission amongst them, it would reduce the amount of household close contacts, therefore reducing the number of staff members in schools having to stay at home isolating, but - as has been pointed out by another poster, and quite correctly- not just schools, all professions. Employers are getting sick of it as are most parents, which is completely understandable.

Masking the kids is not about keeping 80 year olds off ventilators. It's about keeping adults in work. It only came about after the household contact rule came about.

You don't have to think it is a great idea, but it is my opinion that this is THE idea. That's all.

What is your evidence for "everyone has had it now"?

We have 118,000 cumulative confirmed cases. If everyone had had it, that would suggest (crudely) that there are 42 infections for every confirmed case. There is no authoritative source suggesting anything close to this ratio.

No, widespread global vaccination and better therapeutics are the way forward. That so-called anti vaccination crowd will include an increasing number of people not inclined to take boosters. There is only so far current vaccines can take us before authorities begin to lose the justification for them via boosters.

OK, I'm probably being a bit thick, but you're saying that teachers are out because members of their families have tested positive, and therefore fall under the "Household close contact who is fully vaccinated must restrict movements for 5 days" rule, which is new?

And you're then suggesting that these household members somehow got it indirectly due to spread in primary schools, which masking would reduce?

It seems a bit far fetched.

I mean, I don't want to be assuming bad behaviour on the part of teachers or their families, but is it not more likely that they're out because they (or their own household members) caught it from their own (adult) social contacts, or their kids picked it up from social contact out of school?

I’m not saying they don’t lower your infection or transmission rate but I am querying how effective they are, or how effective they claim to be?

I always thought that no vaccine could ever be described as being 100% effective, ever, yet we had people, who are highly respected and who now have huge media profiles who were claiming exactly that.

And again, my own personal genuine experiences is most of the people I know who have been infected have been vaccinated. I genuinely know of 2 couples were both women were vaccinated and their partners weren’t. Neither of the partners got it. One of the women is in an awful way and she has been signed off work with long covid until the new year. Her unvaccinated partner, who would be obese, is fine.

A lot of it doesn’t make sense.

@Danye wrote

Who, specifically, are these people? There were plenty of people* who suggested (pre-Delta) that we might get herd immunity from widespread vaccination, based on the data from the clinical trials, but I don't recall anyone saying that the vaccines would be 100% effective on an individual basis, at least after the impact of Delta was known.

As has been pointed out quite often, we are seeing a reproduction number of around 1 from a virus whose basic R number is somewhere upwards of 5. How else would that have been achieved, considering that fairly few people (like 2% of the population) have been confirmed cases?

* myself included, although I have neither any kind of media profile nor any amount of respect

No problem, I’m coming from the same outlook I believe as you. I don’t believe in ignoring COVID, we can’t, we accept some things to live relatively normally with COVID, for example masks, doesn’t bother me in the least apart from when I forget the bloody thing and restrictions in terms of foreign travel etc.

But not what we have been doing, the most restricted country in Europe throughout this entire pandemic over all, asking people to limit their movements to drive numbers in hospitals down and reward then by imposing even more restrictions.

The plan was vaccines, hasn’t really worked out as planned so the plan now it seems is more vaccines…….. when that doesn’t work out, what next, oh emm restrictions and restrictions remaining when the rest of Europe opens up and eases, restrict when we shouldn’t ie during summer months and try open up more when we shouldn’t ie what we done.

If we didn't have such a high vaccine take up we could be back in full lockdown like Austria or a 5am to 5pm curfew like the Netherlands or having to consider mandatory vaccines (highly unlikely here and the UK due to the high take up %).

I know, I don’t have an issue with vaccines, kinda backing up a point I made earlier today, raise any questions at all and kinda labelled anti vax here.

Exactly. I actually think we should cut back testing capacity and use the swabbers and facilities to vaccinate people instead. Getting third doses into arms is critical at this stage.