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

I know you have bought into the R rate, and contact numbers etc etc and all the other data points the bureaucrats threw at us over the two years, but in the end, the meaningful data, the excess death rates, the hospitalizations were all exaggerated.

Again, I know the virus was a nasty infection, I don't doubt that. But the health bureaucrats never had any control over it!!

Please, don't ever play three card monty, no matter how confident you feel!!!

An increase significant enough that resulted in a level 5 lockdown (the highest level) to protect the health service is hardly something you just overlook as nothing.

You've repeatly got basic facts wrong like when lockdowns occurred.

You point out that as lockdown lifted the numbers increased as just seasonal. But this pattern was repeated all over the calendar. It in no way aligns with flu peaks, or viral surges as you call them.

You completely ignore the human behavior and movements associated with the data. Just nothing zilch. Now you've given up and all the data is wrong. Because you can't make sense of it and it's doesn't fit your dogma.

You're back to that old chestnut it's just a flu.

Course they do. You'd think the internet and free instant access to information would make people more rational.

In fact, it does the opposite. Confirmation bias at it's best in this thread. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Or maybe better, there are none so blind as those who see g-men and conspiracies at every turn.

Certainly be interesting to find out.

That's said it's not unusual for top civil servants to end up on multiple boards.

The optics of it are abysmal regardless.

I'm not sure you are even reading my posts to be honest, I have just said it was a nasty infection. We don't know how it aligns with flu peaks because we don't test for flu infections. Feel free to completely dismiss the existence of the viral surge all you want, I won't lose any sleep if you do!

The reason I don't trust the data is precisely because there is no accurate way to measure the contacts or movements of 5 million people...therefore any data related to the movement or contacts of 5 million people is rubbish!!!! Do you understand, it's rubbish!!!! It's inaccurate, pointless...they might as well pull figures out of their asses!! Either data is clean and accurate or it's rubbish!!! Too many fell into that trap, you could understand it given how our media thrust the data in front of us every day....but any reasonable person can now see how misleading the data actually was!

We have a hospital bed stock of 11,000 - the overall occupancy rate of those beds over the pandemic/versus the previous number of years would be a very pertinent data point, but I don't recall ever coming across that...we were told how many were in hospital with covid all the time, do we know how many of those actually caught it in hospital?

Why did they build extra bed capacity in April/May 2020 to dismantle it in Sept 2020...no one knows!! But you guys know all about R rates and incidental infections or whatever garbage ye mentioned previously!

I think it’s easy to forget the early few weeks when we looked on at the situation in Italy and then New York

italy in particular scared a lot of people into accepting the first lockdown and in truth it was the right decision IMHO based on what we knew at that time …..

Things worth investigation imho:

• -the public sector procurement process is unfit for purpose both in normal times and during the pandemic
• - nursing homes death rate (early on)
• 
  

Even at early on it was known that it was quite specific about who was at risk. The danger was if it changed at any point before they got vaccines into play. There a lot of hindsight is 20:20 vision in these threads. Very suspect memories too.

Nursing homes are a no brainer. Understaffed, under resourced, they don't have the facilities or resources to deal with anything infectious. Any sort of bug in normal times sweeps through them, and they locked down often enough before COVID. People only go into nursing homes when they are very vulnerable and often as a last resort.

You don't need every bit of possible data to analyse it and establish patterns and trends. Bit nuts to think you do.

If you know the data in the media is not reliable, then you just ignore it. Not be triggered by it as you seem to be. Its how they sell papers. Water off a ducks back.

Also you shouldn't obsessively watching the news (doom scrolling) which seems to have been your habit. I don't feel the media put anything in front of me. I simply don't watch it. Check it occasionally, doesn't effect me in the slightest.

This is where when looking at media stories you have to look at the story in context. The risk to young for people was low. But not zero.

Also that fit looking person might have an underlying condition, or be carer for someone who is vulnerable.

If someone mental health is unable to deal with such things they should stop looking at the media. I'm not being flippant either. It's been researched.

What a joke...

The data the health bureaucrats published every day was used to determine what civil liberties we were allowed to have from one week to the next...that's the kind of data you want to be accurate, did you ever once even ask yourself how their modelling was so off given the amount of data they had?

I didn't sit in front of the telly gobbling up this garbage like some on here did, that is why they can no longer think straight...you can tell the posters who spent the most time pouring over useless data!!

Thinking that our Health Bureaucrats (who are, the most incompetent in Europe) controlled the spread of the virus for two years is this generations moving statues phenomenon!!!

People on this thread seem to be oblivious that different strains are quite different in how infectious they were and how severe the symptoms. You're talking about different risks in 2022 as 2020 and with unvaccinated population vs vaccinated.

For clarity, I am fully vaccinated, I am 'vulnerable' from both an age and health point of view.

I have not had covid despite being exposed. No-one in my immediate (blood relatives) family has had covid, sister is an anti-vaxxer and didn't get it despite her husband (who was vaccinated) having contracted covid - not a serious problem despite him being very vulnerable. It is now becoming evident apparently that there is significant protection genetically in a large proportion of the population. This fact alone has created scepticism in some people, the natural immunity was not known about at the start of the epidemic, and the information would not have helped even if it had been known.

Yes, elderly people with covid should not have been put in nursing homes, this was a serious error that needs investigation.

Otherwise, the government did what they could in the face of a situation that they had no experience of. Previous experience (Spanish flu) indicated that isolation was a very significant help, in anticipation of vaccination. Yes, the close down had some very bad effects on some people but the government had to do something and in the immediate absence of vaccination and testing it was all they could do. We can argue endlessly about whether there should have been closedown or whether the infection should have been allowed to run through the population, a decision had to be made and there will always be some - especially those with 20/20 hindsight - who will complain any decision was wrong.

There's an irony in complaining about incomplete data then arguing you don't need it. Same with complaining hospital stats are misleading then saying you only need hospital stats.

The % of hospitalisations and deaths is different with different strains and how vaccinated the population is. So at different times the stats are interpreted differently. Context is everything.

You are just howling at the moon at this stage.

Data is data.

It's all analysed the same.

You say you work with data, and you are right, data is often unclean, but if it's unclean then that needs to made clear to anyone using that data to make a decision.

Using unclean data (like positive tests) to then extrapolate r numbers, or anything else related to that data isn't just incompetent, it is useless.

So tell us, when you look at data provided by the health authorities, what questions did you ask? Or did you just accept it blindly? You said you have experience with data...

None were locked down 100% and none could say for certain they didn't have it without a battery of tests. Similarly not everything has to perfect or 100% to have an effect or useful. So it's a fallacy to say they were ideally placed to prevent infection getting. They certainly have advantages. But perfect no.

As for policy. Hospitals need people to leave so there space for new people to come in. No one leaving, no one's coming in. Bed blocking (horrible term I acknowledge) was a thing long before Covid. There only route for hospitals once someone no longer needs hospital facilities, is to transfer them elsewhere. That is the problem. If you've alternatives please suggest some.

Most data isn't perfect or complete. Often it's just a sample and you extrapolate from that.

Don't disagree with most of the rest of that, but kinda judging with the benefit of hindsight.

So again, as someone who works with data, what questions did you ask when you looked at the data health bureaucrats provided? You do realise you are the one on here defending the data the government provided us right? The rest of us are the one's not taking it at face value!!!!

You are absolutely correct, no data set is perfect. You can only really extrapolate if you have a good cross sectional representation sample of the overall set you are trying to work from. We never got close to having that kind of sample or even a consistent sample for that matter. The testing regimes changed all the time, the variants changed, the level of movement within the country changed, people's behavior changed as fatigue set in. I could go on and on but I think you get my point.

Certainly was a constantly shifting target and environment. So all this hindsight stuff makes little sense to me.

I don't think what they had was completely useless though. I think thats the sky is falling kind of mindset.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUHunfH0XbI&ab_channel=desm71

Yes but if you are dictating extreme restrictions on civil liberties based on them it's an extremely worrying aspect of the whole pandemic.