The Omicron variant

Are you Nigel Molesworth's Irish cousin?

Seems like your fallacy is in comparing Covid to something that is and was only found out after the fact of ingesting. It was once thought tomatoes were poisonous so people didn't eat them. In fact the roots, leaves, and to an extent the unripened fruit of the tomato plant is poisonous. It would take a good quantity of the plant to cause death and that is in much the same way that Covid is deadly to what some here will call a minority in society - the difference being it would take only a small quantity of the dangerous parts of the tomato plant to kill them. In general though if something has been tasted and it is bitter then it will likely cause you problems, so it comes down to the scale of it. Covid is wide spread so it is large scale, you will be hard pressed to find anywhere in the world that has recorded 0 cases in their society. In comparison to dangerous foraging activities; being infected by Covid from lack of social awareness and or the complete lack of cautiousness is the equivalent of looking at someone eating that poisonous fruit and not telling them it will kill you.

Solution a) HSE finally deals with our hospital capacity or b) impose unnecessary restrictions on the entire population to cover their own inefficiency.

91 people in ICUs, nowhere near capacity. Hospital numbers going up but will only be overwhelmed if staff illnesses due to Covid.

The Dutch Govt are only taking it seriously the last few months, the people largely aren't bothered.

We have consistently had a very high level of testing. Other countries haven't really bothered for a lot of the time.

There will be no lockdowns, they might delay school and universities for a week to spread out the rate of infection but that's about it.

Early January isn't noted for being a social time in a normal year.

When vaccinated you carry the viral load for a much shorter period, hence far less likely to pass it on. Thus the more people who are vaccinated the less likely it is to pass on.

Guess it is about the non Covid in ICU and the other staff.

The Netherlands is in lockdown right now. I assume you mean it won't last beyond 14 Jan?

Completely untrue. You have to be symptomatic and sent by a GP for a PCR test in Slovakia and Czech because there's a backlog and they don't have the testing capacity. If you can't get a health service test you have to pay privately for a PCR which is between €45 and €60, very expensive for those two countries.

Slovakia today has 1,221 cases and 47 deaths

Czech has 2,011 and 22 deaths

Ireland has 6,735 and no deaths. The average for the past week has been 8 deaths.

We're testing far more and thus getting far more positive cases. The aforementioned five Slavic countries aren't testing greatly so their case numbers are enormously underestimated. The death rates are a multitude of times higher than ours (lower numbers for them above than recently as some administrative staff and coroners off over Xmas) and will only increase over the next 5/6 weeks.