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

Agreed. Norma Foley and the dept of Education were a disaster throughout Covid.

Which is it? This is a bit of a shotgun.

Do you think pubs should have been allowed to open without restrictions all throughout the pandemic? That seems to be implication of 'maybe we didn't need to recommend their closure'. Pubs are a high risk location for transmission. Do you want to show us 'the science' that says otherwise?

Many other countries closed pubs too at times and some (France or Italy I think) re-opened establishments only until 7pm or 9pm, allowing time for dinner serving but not later drinking. That was 'the science' there.

So we have a situation where public health experts in many countries, looked at hospitality and said, this is a high risk setting for an infectious respiratory disease, we need to remove or limit the risk here somehow.

So we were not an outlier in closing them \ putting limits on their operation.

Somebody has to be the country with X restricted longer than anyone else, that's just how lists work. In and of itself it doesn't mean anything.

We also have a high proportion of 'wet' pubs compared to some other countries, where establishments are more mixed use, it's about family and group meals and there's less mingling.

I think pubs should have opened up earlier for outdoors in 2020 for example.

The safest thing to do would have been to go with NPHET's recommendation for restaurants only / perhaps with the early closing idea to limit the risk in these high risk venues pre vaccines.

The close contact \ R factor for a group of people mingling and drinking in a pub is going to be different for a group sat together at the same (socially distanced) table for a meal. That's the science behind it. Maybe it wasn't practicable to put that into practice in our drinking culture. But I've explained the rationale behind it. And all the things I've said here will likely be what you will hear when this comes up in the proposed inquiry.

At the time it was suspected Tony Holohan and others on NPHET had an anti-pub agenda. The way they kept moving the goal posts was real manna for the CT lot.

There was a bit more to it than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Dublin_riots

I think the length of our lockdowns was directly related to our hospital capacity or lack thereof. We have one of the highest capacity utilisation rates in the OECD so whenever there is a surge, we simple cannot cope. It happens every single winter. That's on the successive governments.

They were absolute thugs, running on cars, throwing bottles at people trying to have a bit of lunch, setting bins on fire.

Thankfully we have the public order unit to deal with these thugs.

An Article from the Irish edition of yesterdays Sunday Times reported that number of Irish men with suspected prostate cancer rose by 23% while lung cancer diagnosis is up by 20% since 2019. The Irish Cancer society has noted these increases are almost certainly due to delayed diagnosis due to Covid.

One area the government need to act on ASAP is the obesity crisis that’s gripping this country.

Let them run adverts 24/7 of obese people struggling to walk and the heart disease wards get that worry meter going overtime.

increase taxes on all junk food, stop giving money back voucher in Supermarkets if you buy junk food in your shopping like what they do with drink. Junk food only isles and and blocked off like the drink isles.

Plain packaging on all junk food, pictures of clogged arteries like they do with cigarettes.

Ban on e-scooters and e-bikes for all under 18s nothing but overweight people using them.

use the extra tax money generated to provide mobile workshop to disadvantaged areas to show people how to cook and educate them on nutrition and effects of junk on their bodies.

Add more physical education into the primary curriculum and teach kids how to feed themselves and effects food has on your body and mind.

Start now, but I fear it’s too late for this country move heaven and earth like they did with the virus the population has never been sicker get the finger out and get off your arses.

Stay safe..

Yeah , true and there aren't any tomatoes and cucumbers to be got even ...

Very hard for families for a while now .

I would like to see the actual figures / source and if they are age standardised. I have seen a lot of excess mortality figures over the course of the pandemic and they are not always comparing like with like.

If the figures do hold up my previous points about Swedens approach not scaling, piggybacking on their neighbours and having advantages wrt density, ICU and voluntary buy in from the population adhering to advice etc still stand as far as Im concerned.

They did a good job with vaccines though.