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

I don't think hand sanitising ever did much for COVID.

Probably helped a lot with the spread of lots of other things.

And good to see it finally enforced in health settings.

Obesity epidemic still a raging fire.

'During the pandemic, people living with overweight and obesity were disproportionately affected due to greater exposure to obesity risk factors [..]

Meanwhile, lockdowns and other measures designed to curb the virus gave rise to a host of factors, such as stress and economic hardship, that may promote obesity, the report notes. [..]

Across Europe, obesity is linked to at least 200,000 new cancer cases annually, with this figure projected to rise in the coming decades. In some countries, obesity will overtake smoking as the main risk factor for preventable cancer in the coming decades.'

In Korea at the mo. They lifted the requirement to wear masks outdoors this week - at a guesstimate, slightly over half are still doing so. Masks still required indoors (not eateries) and on transport etc. Significantly older population hereabouts though.

Haha , this is funny Fintan !

He was a clown called McDonkey all through this by so many here ..now he continues to talk rubbish , and on Pat Kenny , no less 😁..but no , hark he has found the holy Word of the Truth!

And all is good now with Fintan and his followers and Dr McConkey.

Careful now ...next thing you'll be listening to Clare Byrne and commending her journalistic skills .

I honestly don't know what you're trying to say here GG. If you're trying to defend Sam McConkey, spare us, as this was the man who initially claimed there would be in excess of 200k deaths from Covid. For an infectious disease "expert", this is truly astounding, and how he has any credibility left is beyond me. In my line of work (engineering), if I was out by a magnitude of 3, I would be fired. Why isn't he questioned over this figure he bandied about with aplomb? But no, he is still wheeled out as some kind of sage. Pathetic.

That was the 8th of March 2020... Where, working off a death rate of 2-3%, and reckoning that 4million of the population would get it, he did indeed come up with 80-120k deaths by multiplication... Not any insanely complicated calculations.

Was 2-3% an overestimate? Yes, thankfully. But that was the number based on the data at the time. Was 4million an overestimate? Probably not in the end.

Of course, some boardsies scoffed then and scoffed now, (a) with the benefit of hindsight, and (b) in the happy position that their speculation didn't matter to anyone and they had the luxury of not being responsible for any decision-making regarding anyone's well-being.

Based on the data at the time, which was based on only testing people in hospital? Sorry, it was a nonsense figure then and its a nonsense figure now. If he estimated 20 deaths he would be hammered for it, overestimating impacted behaviour and policies too, so he should be hammered for that also.

They're busy playing host/hostess to unvaccinated strangers staying in their spare rooms and holiday homes. #zelenskiyy

Because the figures he provided were quite clearly wildy outlandish...is it that difficult to understand? He predicted over 10 times the deaths we have had (which is a questionable figure it itself). He was wrong by an incredible magnitude, you don't need to defend it.

So what figures/modelling/calculations would you have done?

Wow, nice retort. I'm not an infectious disease expert, but if I was I would be ashamed of myself for throwing about the figures McConkey did with such abandon.

‘Could’ being the operative word. So he was correct.

This, in a dynamic situation with lots of unknowns you assume the worst case until more data becomes available, you then work on getting better data. It is literally crisis management 101. The CFR was high for a virus until the vaccine rollout occurred, it was not 2-3% but could have been 1% with inaction. The US has hit 0.3% even with a fast vaccine rollout.

Certainly at the start it was looking like 2-3%. And this was primarily because for the most part the majority of the cases that we were aware of were bad to critical. People with mild symptoms (or no symptoms) were in general not being tested, therefore not being counted, therefore the only people we knew about were really, really sick.

This is borne out in the worldometer graph:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#case-outcome

At the start, CFR is super high because you have like 100 cases and they're all really sick. Like, dying in the ICU sick, because nobody knew what was wrong with them. Then it plummets as you become aware of loads more cases, but these people aren't actually dying. There was also a small lull in case growth as China got on top of thing. Then it rose again as the virus spread and the world went, "Oh sh1t, loads of old people are dying at the moment and we've been writing them off as age-related pneumonia, but we should actually be testing them to see if it's Covid"

As that graph shows, 2-3% CFR for pre-Omicron strains without vaccination, seems about right. It's where the data was settling around the start of 2021, and basically paused around 2.2% in August when Delta kicked in.

So while McConkey was not wrong to use that number, he was probably wrong to assume an 80% infection rate in Ireland at that time. Covid was not that infectious in March 2020, and we even knew that. The earlier strains seemed to start to falter around the 60% vaccination rate. So an 80% infection rate was never a thing. Omicron, of course, changed that. It'll go well beyond 80% if it hasn't already.

You can then see a very clear cliff that the CFR falls off in January as Omicron kicks in. The global cumulative CFR dropped by 30% at the start of 2022. Which tells us how mild Omicron is in comparison. Between 1st January 2022 and today, there have been 807,000 deaths worldwide on the back of 229 million cases. That's a CFR of 0.3%.

For the entire rest of the pandemic, the CFR is 1.9%

If Omicron kept its infectiousness but had been as serious as Delta, McConkey wouldn't have been far wrong. But then there are many reasons why such a scenario is super unlikely.

Agree . See my post replying to live4tkd above .

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