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

Seems to have stagnated! Possibly due to a lot to do with the HSE going back to some sort of normality and there’s a high incidence of asymptomatic people going into hospitals now! Still 10k cases a day! Looking at last nights figures the Mater looks to have a large outbreak.. I think this is where we’ll be at until they stop recording them. 400-600 in hospitals. Icu has stayed between 60-75 over the last two weeks as well

Yes I understand the case/death rate is lower, however, there are a couple of problems with that IMO.

First of all we didn't know at any point the true number of cases and we have increased our detection infrastructure vastly from the early days. It stands to reason that in the early days our actual cases were much much higher than what we got through testing.

They certainly still are/were in the latter stages - I could go on about testing methodologies at this point which are still sh1te - but I don't want to carry this off on a tangent. But the point stand IMO.

Secondly isn't it about absolute numbers? If the absolute number of deaths was unacceptable during the early phases of this, so unacceptable that unprecedented measure were taken, how come those absolute numbers are now 'grand'?

Don't get me wrong. I was always anti-restriction, always thought it was an overreaction and I want this to end. I just can't get my head around it. There seems no consistency inn the logic/message. Where am I going wrong or am I?

@CalamariFritti wrote:

It was mostly always about hospitals. Or rather, about the ability of our infrastructure to cope. And the driving force behind that is to minimise preventable deaths.

If it was a case that this was an illness which genuinely was no worse than a cold or flu for most of the population, then there would have been few, if any lockdowns. That is, if very frail people were dying in nursing homes (and their own homes) from Covid, because ICU was pointless, then there would have been no need for such restrictions in general life. Hospitals could have ticked along as normal. As callous as it sounds, that's the reality. We probably would have put in plans to just cocoon vulnerable people and protect them without other restrictions.

But that's not how it worked. Yes, it affects older people more, but it meant that otherwise functioning older people (and plenty in the 40-70 group too), were ending up in hospital beds and on ventilators.

This causes a squeeze in hospital resources, and means that non-covid treatment becomes unavailable too. Which means that people die.

So yes, while at the root of it all is an aim to avoid people dying, the primary aim is to avoid a situation where people are dying from any illness because the system is too overwhelmed to treat them.

48% of our deaths didn't go to hospital. 87% didn't go to ICU. In both cases presumably because the doctors decided it was futile, or they died before they even got there. If those numbers were closer to 75% of deaths don't go to hospital and/or 99% don't go to ICU, then there would have been no need for restrictions. Because there would have been no risk that hospitals would be overwhelmed.

But it's not realistic that an unvaccinated illness could have a mortality rate of (say) 20% in people over 70, and close to zero in those under. There's always a curve. As a result you find a high level of correlation between the raw number of deaths and the impact on the hospital system.

Vaccination changes that. It means that you can have a relatively high raw number of deaths without significant impact on the hospital system.

To answer an obvious question that comes out of this: "If our hospital system had sufficient capacity in March 2020, would we ever have gone into lockdown? "

The short answer is that no, we wouldn't. But "sufficient" capacity to handle Covid at that stage would have been multiples of the capacity that we would require in normal times. In effect, we would have a health system 5-10 times larger than we needed it to be pre-pandemic. This is why everyone went into lockdown of some form. Because no country runs a health system that large.

Doesn't look to be anything out of the ordinary for the Mater, it's been mainly in the top 2 numbers wise most of the time throughout. It also houses the national isolation unit so it's generally been one of the busiest.

Great to see there has been no big jump in cases even with everything fully open. It even looks like we might be starting to go down again, similar to what's happening in UK. All looking good for the end of remaining restrictions in March.

Hey, Orla

Leave our kids alone!

I see the swedes have stopped testing as a whole, even for those with symptoms.

As at 24 January 2022, Omicron now 97.9% of cases in Ireland sequenced. Delta 2.1%. Other variants 0%

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-variants-area?country=~IRL

Sweden are putting an end to widespread testing:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-40803960.html

They'll be offering it to select groups only as needed (same as any other virus, basically)

Johnson flags that the UK will end the legal requirement to isolate towards the end of this month:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-60319947

Neither country are great examples historically, but it does tell us where we're all going. If there's no legal requirement to self-isolate, then employers will tell employees to come into work even if they're sick, and people will stop getting tested. As it is, many people only get tested so they have a legal excuse for sick pay. Once that ends, people will stop testing.

We'll do the same here in short order, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but it has to be done.

In fairness she has made some good points about air hygiene. I think it is a scandal that we are not moving quickly on that. Even if the pandemic is over, sorting out air hygiene will have long term benefits to the health of the population.

Already looking forward to Orla Hegarty's meltdown on that day. Should be a good one coming soon with masks being removed too.

Luke O'Neil was on Pat Kenny show this morning discussing a huge study around antigen testing (done in the UK I think).

Apparently it was found, that antigen tests will be positive when a person is most likely to spread the disease, and negative when far less likely to spread the disease due to less viral load in the respiratory system and some other reasons I forget now.

PCR is far more sensitive, so detects virus in people who aren't sick or contagious. Pat shrieked in glee that his support of antigen testing was a winning bet after app this time.

So essentially, antigen is a more realistic test for preventing spread of the disease due to its rapid result and not highlighting false positives.

So after 2 years, the conspiracy theorists are proved correct on both PCR testing and control of information regarding severity of illness as you reference above