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

The flip flop between it only effects old people, it doesn't matter and OMG won't you think of the old people, its quite something to see.

I believe it was 5 years ago today since the Beast from the East.

At the time the hysterical overreaction to a bit of snow seemed amusing, the social media posts of people queueing outside supermarkets for awful processed sliced pans appeared harmless enough.

Little did we know at the time, how these same forces would be used to erode our democratic freedoms, curtail our civil liberties and make us one of the most indebted nations on the planet.

Mainstream media stopped trying to compete against social media some time ago and we live in a world where policy and politicians are beholden to the Facebook Karen's and Paddy's of this world.

If Covid happened in 2000 instead of 2020 the response to it would have been entirely different. I look on Covid as more of a social media virus than a respiratory one.

The most depressing aspect of it all is the seeming unwillingness of the population (and thereby the politicians and policy makers) to learn anything from it. Every week and month which passes, more evidence mounts of the absolute futility of the vast majority of the responses - and that's without taking into account the eye-watering cost of them.

There are people who emotionally invested so much into the 'killer-disease' narrative and wasted away 2 years of their lives, that their ego will not allow them to back down. They would rather bankrupt the country a hundred times over than look in the mirror and admit they got things very wrong.

The politicians must be absolutely delighted that nobody will hold them to account for presiding over such a waste of money and resources.

There a fatal flaw in your logic. Its not scientific unless its agrees with their opinion.

Peoples opinions were only formed by media and social media blasting them with 24/7 propaganda. An independent scientific body should not be influenced by that in any case.

Not everyone mindlessly consumes media 24/7 without ever critically analysing it.

The problem with the modelling is that it was never meant to be used outside of academia. You can’t model how 5 million people will interact with even the tiniest degree of accuracy. Anyone pretending otherwise was only fooling themselves. The wide degree of variance between the models and the orders of magnitude difference is proof that they were completely unreliable.

I didn't say statistical modeling wasn't used outside of academia. I'm referring to the modeling group used by nphet to determine people's interactions and the spread of an airborne virus. The assumptions baked into the models were so variable as to be meaningless. The models also don't show anything to differentiate between correlation and causation. As an example, early in the pandemic we knew little about this virus so bringing in a 2km restriction and then claiming they worked to bring down numbers ignores human behavior which would have very likely have meant people would cut down interactions regardless of any travel restrictions due to the unknown nature of the virus.

These types of models are okay for someone writing their thesis to extrapolate high level findings from a defined set of preconditions. Fir real world applications we should be extremely cautious in how they are used to implement government policy and the wide ranging implications they have on the population at large.

The accuracy of the models (beyond the clickbait worst case headlines) says otherwise. They literally predicted what would happen in Christmas 2020 to a high level of accuracy when the politicians went for the meaningful Christmas.

The typical rants on here are about anecdotal cases (this person travelled 6 km and wasn't punished, why is it safe for me to travel 1.9km but unsafe to go another 200m), modelling will look at everything on a macro level and doesn't care about the pub serving take away as a meal because it's usually a one off and won't impact greatly on the modeling (in fact the model would include % drift due to non-compliance as well).

As said, that's the scientific explanation, responding with "statical modeling wasn't used outside of academica" is ignoring all the science, in which case it falls back to feelings and opinions (and they were majority in favour of the measures as well).

The healthcare system is a model, the finance budget is a model, hell, the war in Ukraine is being played out to a very accurate model put together by western militaries.

90% of the inquiry will consist of NPHET members saying 'we were only there to advise' and the politicians responding that they felt obligated to 'follow the advice'.

This little game of pass the parcel will neatly absolve anyone from having to take any responsibility for anything.

Everyone will tell each other what a fantastic job they did in such difficult circumstances and then will sail off into the sunset with their gold-plated pensions and cushy eurocrat jobs.

The Irish taxpayers (and their kids and grandkids) will be left to foot the bill for all the barristers - along with the 100bn we added to our national debt.

NPHET was a con-job right from the start, 60 odd members all from essentially the exact same background. Single-issue bureaucrats, living in ivory-towers nodding like obedient dogs when Dr Tony made a proclamation.

Where were the child phycologists, the economists, the business representatives? NPHET was engineered specifically to examine only one aspect of Covid, how to stop or slow transmission. It did not examine, nor was qualified to look at the adverse implications of any of their advice. The Government did not want it spiting out a range of options with the advantages and disadvantages listed because then they would have had to make a decision and be accountable for that decision.

Good post. It's interesting to ponder on what the response would have been pre-social media and the current super-sensationalised media.

In other news, there's a number of media pieces today that it will be cold next week...

I know your job is to rabidly argue with any criticism of NPHET but its quite something even for you to see a post lamenting the failure in nursing homes and immediately claim it was writing off the elderly.

When copy and pasting stock responses it might be advisable to check if they actually fit the original post.

I was referring to the hypocritical posts in the thread. Thats why my comment said ... "thread"..(for the hard of reading).

Talk about having no shame.

You literally quoted me, at least own your disingenuous behaviour.

Have to say, its pretty funny that you didn't realise who I was quoting in my original post, sure have a wee look there if you still don't. Hint, it wasn't anybody in the thread...