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

The prevalent NPHET (and Government) view appears to desire a population who will remain indoors for most of their non-productive time,as in Work then Home ,or Work from Home.

The future,as desired by these people appears to be that Travel outside a tightly defined zone will only be permitted if your are wealthy enough to pay a hefty premium OR you are a member of the Diplomatic Corps.

One can only hope that somebody like Micheal O'Leary will get enough head of steam up to resist these "Policies",most of which directly challenge the very principles of Freedom & Democracy.

The Africa question is now appearing more frequently as an integral part of moulding public response in the Western World.

It is a tried & tested methodology,practiced over the decades with Famine,Civil War and inter cine strife all being a regular causative factor to unlock more Aid Funding and NGO supports for the region.

The statistics,such as they are,appear to suggest the African Continent's Covid experience may not be identical to the European one.

Ascribing Racism to the comparison you make is about as useful as a triple dose of Pfizer in a pandemic,and a large red herring to my mind.

Western attempts to first Govern,then rescue various parts of the Continent have never been anywhere near successful,and Covid will not be any different.

Totally ignoring the initial reportage and experience of the South African Medical Professionals regarding Omicron,and instead brushing aside their factual experiences in favour of wild-eyed panic inducing stuff is IMO,far more racist in tenor than our supposed lack of response to supposed Vaccination inequality.

The bottom graph is perhaps the most interesting in terms of Covid-19 Deaths...

Well and truly snookered themselves with the vaccine message.

Up until last night there was some reasoning for it but that argument has taken a major setback.

If we're facing into a 3 month severe lockdown then many right or wrong will question the worth of taking a booster. Especially when our restrictions have been one of the toughest in the continent.

Something is off here guys, wtf, this is from Mehole:

When asked if a permanent team of vaccinators needs to be in place going into the future, he said: "We are going to have to work on that, yes."

My job frequently brings me into contact with a Government department, they are one of our biggest Clients.

Although the individuals are conscientious, hard-working, nice people, there is a real culture of risk-aversion and unaccountability .They are happy to choose a more expensive and time-consuming way to do something if it reduces the risk of making a wrong decision - even if the cost of doing so far exceeds the consequences of getting something wrong.

It is a completely different culture than a private-sector one - the incentives that drive efficiency and punish waste are completely absent. Their greatest fear is making a decision which will reflect poorly on the relevant Minister.

This manifests itself in many ways, the people who are promoted are the most cautious, most risk-adverse.

The response to Covid is what I see every day, just on a far greater scale. Why make a decision that has even a tiny chance of being the wrong one when you can spend billions of someone else's' money to avoid the risk?

Make no mistake, we will all be paying for this for decades to come, our children and our grandchildren will still be paying fo this when they start working. Interest rates are only going in one direction and we are royally fcuked when our debt becomes ever more expensive to service. This is nothing to do with pubs closing early - this is our quality of services and our quality of life for years and generations to come - that is what is being played with here.

The biggest issue with trying to expand health capacity in the short term is not even building new hospitals or sourcing scarce equipment and machinery - which are challenges in the themselves - but staff. It takes at least 6 years for someone to become qualified to work as a nurse or doctor, often longer. They can’t double the nursing workforce in a year, it’s not feasible. Improvements to capacity should be a medium to long term plan, they won’t help in the short term. You can argue all you like about whether previous governments should have invested more in capacity, yes, they probably should have, but those currently making the decisions must work with what they have now, and rolling out two or three times the capacity overnight is not possible in the timeframe we have. We are not a world power who can strong arm these things, we are a small island nation, sometimes people forget that.

It would have been possible to teach non-specialist nurses to cover covid-specific ICU beds in under a year and then have them working under more specialist ICU nurse supervisors. Same with doctors.

it seems elbow bumps are only for the plebs, they don’t seem to be too worried about this deadly pandemic.

In my experience the first priority for the majority of politicians is to get re-elected. They are not going to get well paid as T.D`s if they fail to achieve that and as I said, I don`t see what the up-side for them with restrictions is. I cannot see it being a great vote getter.

Why would any politician, let alone members of a governing cabinet be worried about Tony Holohan ? He does not have any power whatsoever, he is an adviser. The elected government make decisions, not advisors. The only way he will ever be able to make decisions is the very minimum of getting elected as a T.D. and I cannot see him even putting his name on a ballot paper. There really is a lot of nonsense on this threads about this power Tony Holohan supposedly has..

You'll never get a job on NPHET modelling with that kind of guesswork, you should have doubled it! Oh and it's 400 and 100.

Its hard to do. No **** sherlock.

But you start somewhere, so what are they doing about it?

Remember Irelands call? Remind me how many got recruited in that drive ?