Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

Who told you that.

Yeah. I haven't seen or heard any evidence of same.

The new JN.1 variant is spreading rapidly. Many have got it here. Most shops have taken down the plastic screens around the tills. Why? Not a bad idea in any case..

When the UK looked at it, they found that there was no real excess in deaths. To suggest the media is largely silent is also simply false, there have been many articles about it in the media such as the Guardian and BBC and Sky News.

The so-called 'high' excess deaths are just a distortion caused by the pandemic interfering with the baseline and changing demographics.

And also, it has been established that a covid infection, causing long covid, causes a significant increase in mortality risk well beyond 28 days.

Nonsense already discredited a few posts up but apparently your commitment to truth and logic doesnt extend to reading even the most recent page of a thread.

This is like thinking your car doesnt need ABS cos you havent crashed. The death of logic indeed.

Your claim was already discredited by the post just a few above yours, which you made zero attempt to engage with. You are just making statements of fact backed up by absolutely nothing.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121564472/#Comment_121564472

One in six healthcare staff have taken the booster since October, says it all really...

"Just 16.2pc of healthcare staff – one in six – have availed of the Covid booster since October, with a higher percentage opting for the flu jab. This is despite the risk of outbreaks of both viruses in hospital where the health worker was at risk of contracting infection or passing it on to patients."

It doesn't really say much at all actually. It is recommended to wait 9 months between the vaccine and a covid infection but you can get it 3 months after a covid infection if you need a booster, that is according to the HSE website.

Health workers are high risk for contracting covid which is a year round illness, it isn't seasonal like the flu, so health workers probably caught covid before being eligible.

It is not that covid didnt kill anyone, but between the shaky and varying definitions of what a covid death is and the different degrees of data collection, in a lot of countries less than half hearted, it is impossible to tell how serious/real it really was. Which in hindsight seems at least half intentional tbh. It was quite clear from early on that after the disaster of the previous 'failed' pandemic the officials were determined to leave no doubt that this was a 'serious' pandemic and they threw every media and other strategy at it they could find.

I mean they had no other choice after going 'all in' like that. The general populace couldn't possibly be left wondering or doubting. And I actually mean that. If you commit entire societies like this things obviously have to be kept together. Doubts aren't allowed. And of course the aftermaths aren't allowed to be negative either. And I get that to some degree. Not saying it's malicious as such.

But that doesn't mean that it was necessarily the correct choice and that we didnt hear nothing but the truth and that I need to be happy about it. This pandemic was, once committed, as much a political/social disciplinary exercise as an actual health emergency. How some people will deny that to their deaths I cannot understand. I would have thought this was quite obvious once you engage more than your frontal lobes for a minute or two. I guess some people prefer simple messages.

The reference to the under 45s was a counter to the constant claim that Covid only killed people who would have died anyway so we should have just left the old people to their fate.

The reference to Bulgaria was made because it’s a country that had high excess deaths across the board, per the same OECD report, but no opioid epidemic. I understand you won’t have even opened the report let alone read it, so there you go.

I’m not shaking my fist. I’m pumping my fist in celebration at a job well done and right wing conspiracy lunatics being proved so emphatically wrong.

People under 45 make up a miniscule amount of COVID deaths in relation to the total, and people without underlying conditions an even more miniscule amount, if any. To try and claim that excess deaths in this age group are due to COVID is ridiculous, especially when the actual evidence shows that it's due to other causes such as overdoses and suicides. Everyone knows at this stage who is vulnerable to COVID, and it's not young people. Stop spreading misinformation

The recently published paper “Excess mortality in England post Covid-19 pandemic: implications for secondary prevention” published in December 2023 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(23)00221-1/fulltext makes for an interesting read.

According to the authors excess deaths in UK amounted to 7.2% or 44,255 more deaths registered in 2022 and 8.6% or 28,024 (only in first 6 months of 2023) more than expected.

47% of those deaths were associated with “all cardiovascular diseases (12%), heart failure (20%), ischaemic heart diseases (15%)”. That is roughly 34k deaths for the 18 month period.  To put this into context, the German bombing raids during the 1940/1941 Blitz killed approximately 40k civilians in Great Britain.

It is the 50-64 year olds (15% higher excess deaths than expected), and 25–49 and < 25 year olds (11% higher) that are more affected than the over 65 year old group (9% higher). Interestingly the number of deaths that occur in private homes was 22% higher than expected, which would suggest that these deaths occurred suddenly and possibly due to unknown causes.

The authors mention only “Covid-19 infection, acute pressures on NHS acute services resulting in poorer outcomes from episodes of acute illness, and disruption to chronic disease detection and management” as possible causes of these excess deaths. They completely failed to consider other possible causes. Their association with the big pharma may have played a part there.

The demographic groups for which the excess deaths numbers are particularly high (25-49 and 50-64 year olds) are of a much better health than the 65+ cohort and far less likely to die of Covid and its much milder variant, as well as are much less reliant on healthcare services when it comes to acute illness, disease detection and management. While it is easy to see the logic of how the 65+ could be affected by the causes mentioned by the authors, same cannot be said for the younger demographic. It is very likely that there are other causes that dominate and drive the excess deaths for these younger demographics that have been ignored by the authors. 

And there's the conspiracy theory dog whistling about "big pharma" when the experts don't come to an anti vax conclusion! Why not just come right out and say it instead of the big pharma dog whistling, because what else could those big bad words 'big pharma' be referring to?

The safety and effectiveness of the vaccines are well established, and before there is any dog whistling about side effects such as myocarditis, it is well established also that the impact of infection is much riskier than vaccination. So if someone is genuinely concerned about heart issues to do with the pandemic, and sincerely looking at the data, isn't is strange to just jump over and disregard such findings - instead of trying to cherry pick out something to dog whistle about vaccines?

One of the authors of the paper, Stuart McDonald has estimated potentially 400 deaths a week due to NHS delays in responses.

https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1735358048699404470

And yes people across all ages end up in A&E and their outcomes are dependent on response times. Otherwise, how were they dying before the pandemic such that we are discussing 110% versus 100%?

People in age group 50-64 are in an age demographic where heart attacks are a concern, that is nothing new wrt the pandemic. And people aged under 50 too, because we are talking about percentage increases of 20% and 30% - so what was causing all those heart attacks in those demographics before covid? We are talking about an increase on a baseline figure, a baseline figure that is much larger than the increase.

Here is an article showing an increase in heart attacks in age group 25 to 44 in the US - an increase that started before vaccines were rolled out, to pre-empt any more dog whistling.

People between 25 and 44, who saw a 29.9% relative increase in heart attack deaths over the first two years of the pandemic (which means the actual number of heart attack deaths were almost 30% higher than the predicted number).

https://www.today.com/health/covid-heart-attack-young-people-rcna69903

The increase started in 2020:

U.S. deaths from heart disease spiked in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic after a steady decline from 2010 to 2019, reversing a public health success, according to preliminary research to be presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2022. 

https://newsroom.heart.org/news/heart-disease-death-rates-spiked-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-erasing-years-of-progress

In the article referenced, cardiovascular and heart issues are mentioned... and guess what causes a higher risk, yes of course it is Covid infection.

COVID-19 is associated with higher risks of cardiovascular disease and death in the short- and long-term, according to a study in nearly 160,000 unvaccinated participants co-led by a UCL researcher.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/jan/covid-19-patients-may-retain-elevated-risk-death-18-months-after-infection

And we have another study showing a significant increase in mortality risk to under 65s from long covid:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.778434/full

@obi604 Yes blood can contaminate the result unfortunately (see below). There's a whole debate online about whether the antigen tests should use a saliva swab. I'm not aware of any of the antigen tests on the market here being approved except for nasal swab, but double check the small print on your particular pack.

So I don't think anyone here would be able to advise further except at risk of breaching medical advice rules.

I can only refer you to the official info sites e.g. according to the FDA

Excess blood or mucus on the swab specimen may interfere with test performance and may yield a false-positive result.

https://www.fda.gov/media/168485/download#:~:text=Excess%20blood%20or%20mucus%20on,yield%20a%20false%2Dpositive%20result.