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

Clearly there are people here who feel we would have coped better with Covid if our government worked without any medical advice. With insight like that, I have no interest in continuing the debate. As far as I'm concerned, Holohan worked tirelessly on behalf of the nation and deserves thanks for that. But of course politicians run before the mob when a public servant should be defended. They have no backbone. We have lost his expertise which no doubt will be well rewarded elsewhere.

He did his job for which he was paid extremely well . I should bloody hope on that salary that he did a good job Many others did a wonderful job including nurses , ambulance crews , supermarket workers , transport etc etc

My admiration goes to those who got up every morning many on low wage and kept this country going

There wasn't much to listen to. It was more of a broken clock and varying levels of personal outrage and histrionics at lives being disrupted in such a way. Boris went your route once, and changed his mind very fast as people were dying. There's a whole lot of Captain Hindsight at work here and you were just as clueless as the rest of us about what COVID might do. It's actually like making selective evidence suit your conclusion, otherwise known as bad science.

Personally find this settling of scores increasingly baffling. Did COVID mess up my life? Yes of course, as much as many others and far less than those who were directly affected by it. But it is now over, in the rearview mirror so to speak, except for all the new things I learnt and did. That's a better COVID legacy IMO than the obsessive rerunning of all the imagined wrongs that COVID public health measures did to people.

My advice is to move on from this and not be the bore who goes off about COVID and what happened at the drop of a hat. I have not had a COVID conversation in the best part of 6 months, beyond the far less frequents posts here, and I suspect it's a common theme for others.

What's up with China locking down again? If they were any good the first time round, it wouldn't have spread.

Cliona O’Farrelly is basically finger wagging at people living their lives. She can go and do one as far as I’m concerned with that statement.

So do you match the criteria for the trial?

I don't read the thread or visit here really anymore but I see you are still banging the same drum about freedoms and restrictions not working despite them actually working, You have provided a shred of evidence to the contrary, the current situation isn't evidence either as well you know. Thinking you are right and being right are two different things. It's quite funny now 😂

Not really, as far as I can tell. He seems to be calling on the government to not let the possibility of restrictions fall away, to ensure that the plans set out to manage Covid are kept in play rather than just abandoning them and taking a complete return to normal. (Granted, I only skimmed what's being reported)

Remember that he said this before we pillory our own INMO and other commentators - it's not a uniquely Irish position that some call for this. :)

I understand why there is concern. And GG laid it out earlier in the thread. Health services are still struggling to deal with isolation of positive cases and staff absences. They need these to come under control, and from a health perspective, the responsible/appropriate approach is to try and reduce the number of cases in the general population in order to prevent them arriving in hospitals.

The problem is that - responsible as it may be - it cannot work. Omicron is beyond control. China have been locking people into their apartments in Shanghai and testing the entire population every 3 days for Covid, and yet, it's spreading like wildfire. 25% of ALL of China's covid cases have occurred in the last five days.

So it is just not realistic to think that reintroducing minor restrictions like masks into western nations will make a blind bit of difference. We know they don't work anymore. That Omicron is simply better at spreading than we are at stopping it.

So what are health services to do? Ignore Covid unless it is the cause of illness. Which is anathema to health practice, I know. But it's not irresponsible - infection control measures no longer work - outside and inside of hospitals. Isolating asymptomatic patients and absenting asymptomatic staff, is not reducing the spread of covid in hospitals. Therefore, logically if infection control measures are degrading your health service, and they're not actually working, the responsible thing to do is to stop.

Stop doing them so that you can improve the ability of the health service to deliver.

Sometimes the right thing to do is counter-intuitive. If it was discovered that X-ray baggage checks at airport security were actually making it less safe to fly, we would stop doing them. However odd that would feel. Likewise, some of the covid-related infection control measures we are employing in the hospital system are now making hospital systems less safe. People are struggling to get access to important health care. Therefore the responsible thing to do is to fix the infection control measures to focus on what works and what's proportionate.

All the liberal leaning states will be quick to rush back into restrictions. Universities are the same now.