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

Evidence of any criticism of Irish approach - zero.

Instead... Expresses real confidence in Irish officials abililty to judge what restrictions are needed including lockdowns as a measure.

Maybe you dont want to call it praise. This is not criticism. This is support, if not praise.

"The reason why I say I think that's possible in Ireland is that I'm really confident that the public health people are able to work out what might be the most appropriate restrictions... If things get really bad, yeah, they'll have to go back into lockdown."

https://www.thesun.ie/news/7927861/ireland-avoid-return-full-covid-19-lockdown/amp/

Look, I'm not getting into a war of semantics with you. I'm bored of it already and the thread will be completely unreadable.

My point was this, the WHO were against using lockdowns as a primary means of controlling the pandemic, that's stated clearly in the article I posted. My comment was that it was something our own officials went against and used lockdowns quite a bit. Now, this is the important part that seems to be causing you some confusion, that last comment is mine and not from the WHO. I never said it was something th WHO directly mentioned, it's my own words.

By the way, I'm not being one bit disingenuous. Nabarro didn't praise our health officials, he said he had confidence they would be able to avoid another lockdown. I've shown a quote where he said this and you even quoted it back to me. I'm not entirely sure what this back and forth is about. If you want to take it as meaning he was full of praise for our health officials, that's fine by me, but I was just pointing out he never actually said those words.

You were challenged on putting experts into quotes, and then when challenged on that accuse others of personal bias? From an armchair 'expert' calling out credentialed experts in quotes? Pull the other one.

You haven't even attempted to show what was wrong in how the experts came to the figures they came to. They may be wrong, in hindsight, with better data. But that is not the same thing.

It's not the actual fatality rate, for the reasons listed below.

It doesnt study the age group most affected by covid?

This is your evidence?

Or how much more infectious covid is?

So nothing like the flu then.

By your own admission, the new paper doesn't cover it.

To talk of infection fatality rate without talking about the number of infections is only one half of the equation.

The new paper doesn't once mention influenza, doesn't establish that its mechanism for calculating IFR is the same.

Come back to us when you have some real data, and not exercises in deflection and massaging of figures of pre-print studies.

"This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice."

It's called irony, apologies if it went over your head!

Frightening this as I knew would happen as did many others and was flagged yet Martin told Tobin at the time to `get real`.

Being defended to the hilt with some even saying it was unavoidable! Screening shut down for so long and GP visits curtailed.

There has to be some learning for future pandemics.

Nope, society was literally closed down by the powers that be, the media followed along blindly, there was no objection allowed or entertained, lost my mother and father in law to cancer during Covid, not sure how much having better access to proper diagnosis would have helped but we'll never know now.

Society wasn't shut down for the craic.

Society was shut down so that people wouldn't lose loved ones to covid.. and the conversation 18 months later saying we were failed by the government and people weren't protected from covid.

If you have a suggestion as to how services could have been better maintained while managing infection risk, or point to how other countries managed their services better during the pandemic fire ahead.

Bearing in mind, spacing beds 1 versus 2 metres apart has a significant difference on spread.

It's very easy to talk of failures, not so easy to plot the alternative course, while taking for granted all the people they did protect.

Lol, that's why we have the 'experts' in charge, isn't it???

As a matter of fact I do have a couple of suggestions, don't shutdown screening services to begin with AND how about the revolutionary approach of prioritize the illness you know is potentially terminal over one that's could possibly be. Pretty basic stuff really and much, much easier than you are suggesting but they missed both.

I'm not saying our lot were any worse or better than anywhere else but why put an unknown ahead of a known killer? I can't figure it, 'Get real' indeed.