Reflection on the pandemic: questions about the authorities' response.

The very fact that we were working from WHO and medical advise is what worries me being honest. The WHO or doctors don't know the first thing about running a country and blindly taking on all their advice is daft. Should what they were saying be considered in the broader context of what's happening in a country? I would say, they should be one part of the overall discussion.

Our government can't just abdicate responsibility because a handful of medical people tell them one thing. Lok at how laughable the modeling was for the first 12/18 months of the pandemic.

Who's to say that the next set of restrictions won't come from a group of climate experts in the UN reckon the end is nigh unless we lockdown for an extended period of time? It sounds completely batshot crazy to even suggest it but if we blindly follow "the experts" then it's not as far fetched as you might think.

The best of that lot was the €9 substantial meal that was required in order to sit down and drink a few pints. They were making this stuff up on the fly and then claiming it was based on "the science".

These rules that we didn't follow didn't work. Kinda self fulling prophecy in fairness.

Hard to argue they would never work because they did were they were rigidly enforced.

You can argue with some validity they would never have been as successful in Ireland due to our inability to follow rules, or the govt to enforce anything. But the govt can counter argue they worked well enough based on the metrics of that period.

Anecdotally almost everyone I know who got COVID knew exactly where they caught it. Even if they were asymptomatic they could point to a person or an event where they were mostly likely to have got it. Quite predicable like that.

That's only a half story. They lifted rules at times during 2020 and when they did the numbers rose dramatically.

Hmmm *checks notes* we did indeed start to lift restrictions coming into respiratory illness season after being locked down for most of the summer months. Who would have thunk that a respiratory illness would increase over the wet autumn and winter months in Ireland.

They sure did and that was completely expected behaviour. If you have everyone locked down and away from each other then numbers would increase once they were released from said lack down. What was truly baffling was why we continued to lock down during the summer months when the health service were better equiped to deal with rising numbers only to then come out of the restrictions coming into the busy winter months when our hospitals are always under pressure.

Lockdowns work if you a) have no care for civil liberties and b) completely ignore all the negative impacts they have, such as increasing waiting list times for all other hospital care and the serious knock-on effects.

I mean, they work in the same way that burning your house down to get rid of a mouse does.

I think they may have started to realise that businesses and livelihoods could only hold out so long with zero trade.

So you're saying the numbers rose at xmas, they had a lockdown, and the numbers fell and then they lifted lockdown.

But they weren't exactly the same because it was entirely different strains, different years, different population vaccination demographics.

... and the thing you've just explained, confuses you?

Well they started with a different approach then changed it to be similar to many other countries.

You don't seem to be aware but traditionally, Xmas precedes Jan. Perhaps you like forget Xmas exists but it does.

We did have restrictions in 2022. https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/health/covid19/public_health_measures_for_covid19.html

We didn't have the "same" result. They were different strains.

You said "numbers fell off a cliff" which implies they rose to high point preceding it. You can hardly say nothing happened when you just described something happening. A virus doesn't know it's January.

Seems like you don't understand what you wrote.