Most Comical/Hysterical COVID News Stories of the past few years

PTH2009

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/i-will-be-forever-sorry-miriam-ocallaghan-apologises-for-not-leading-by-example-after-rte-gathering/39775851.html

Remember the RTE ppresenters who had to apologise on air because they took a few pictures at a party with a colleague in the canteen but were not social distancing

fun loving criminal

The whole response to covid is quite laughable (I don't know what word to use).

Saying Ireland was low risk at the beginning and other countries had temperature checks at the airports and ourselves with flyers with symptoms at the airport.

Couldn't get a test with symptoms at the beginning unless you met certain criteria.

Closing clothes shops because clothes wasn't essential items.

Mandating masks in shops and on public transport but if you worked in an office and were deemed essential and couldn't work from home, no masks for you.

Wouldn't even consider looking at N95 or KN95 masks as a means for protection.

Mandatory hotel isolation because travellers were apparently more at risk of catching covid but after isolation off you go to the pub around the corner and catch covid there.

People fighting over who should get the vaccine but now you don't see the same people wearing a mask at all.

I'm sure I can add more to this list but absolutely nothing anymore. There's advice on HSE to stay at home with symptoms but nobody bats an eye with sick people going out mingling. Not even sensible advice to wear a mask with anything you might have ie cold, flu or chest infections.

Cheddar Bob

Dya remember about November 2021 we re opened "everything".

Sort of.

Nightclubs were re opened- with the caveat that masks were to be worn at the bar and en route to the toilet, but not anywhere else. Martin implying that "everything that has always went on in a nightclub will still go on" so at least you didn't have to wear a Hazmat suit when you're dropping the paw.

And you couldn't just rock up, a ticket had to be bought online in advance.

Oh, and masking was still required at all times in indoor music venues.

So if I was to see Carl Cox in the Point I would have to remain masked and seated- but if he played the Academy I could rave out on the dance floor and put on the mask when going for a drink. Or a slash.

There were literally dozens of examples of the sheer stupidity and lack of coherent logic in that era, but all of the above so late in the day truly seemed like the last hurrah.

Then the numbers went up again and we shut the clubs and instituted 9pm closing for pubs. I think the above lasted one weekend, two at most.

All of this 4 or 5 months after the complete reopening of English society. After Euro 2021 saw full stadiums.

An international embarrassment.

Then the science changed so that all of a sudden Covid pass travel laws didn't apply because FG's hotel pals needed to fill their rooms with thousands of people from Europe's most vaccine hesitant country.

Add to that how two men having cans by the canal were basically plotting genocide but 5000 BLM marchers were allowed to converge on Ballsbridge with nothing more than a "careful now" from the likes of Harris and Hoolohan. You literally has loons from PBP and the like who were generally terrified of their own shadow (Paul Murphy STILL wears a Covid mask in the Dail, nearly 4 years later) coming out with stuff like "racism doesn't take a day off even during a pandemic".

Paul outdone himself circa August 2021 when the pubs were gradually re opening by demanding it be put on hold because so many young pub staff hadn't received their vaccine invite.

Of course that brought us to the dichotomy whereby a member of the pub staff who hadn't got a vaccine pass would be tasked with checking the passes of customers and refusing access to those who didn't have a pass on the grounds that they were dangerous to others, but unvaccinated staff seemingly were not.

Absolutely bizarre times. The world has permanently changed in favour of emotion and pseudoscience. And frankly I have zero sympathy for anybody under 60 who went along with it and is now crippled with the related inflation or find themselves locked out of the housing market. You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.

Cheddar Bob

To add to the OP- now, not in Ireland, but I seem to recall in Australia when they had one of their several minor outbreaks before it fully arrived same as it did everywhere else, the local news broadcast CCTV showing Patient Zero in a supermarket brushing past people who we all know now were highly unlikely to get more than the sniffles off him. I could be wrong but I think they even added blue coloured graphics showing the theoretical distance reach of the virus emanating from his body.

And an awful lot of people today like to pretend that the only news outlets that reported on dead bodies lying on the streets of Wuhan were The Sun and their ilk, when it was carried by, at the very least, AP and The Guardian (I'd imagine Sky News etc showed the footage at the time and have since scrubbed it)

The fact that nobody seems to care regarding who made these clips, and to what end, is particularly galling.

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121691509#Comment_121691509

Nothing comical or hysterical about it.

Merely from an image it is not possible to say what killed someone. But the image captures the reaction to the event.

It is well established that covid can cause heart attacks and strokes as a secondary impact. Yes it could have killed someone in the street.

You have provided zero evidence the below isnt genuine / actual images from China.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/31/a-man-lies-dead-in-the-street-the-image-that-captures-the-wuhan-coronavirus-crisis

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121691956#Comment_121691956

The implication was it was killing people dead on their feet.

Similarly, what about the firebrand Chinese scientist who tried to warn the public and himself died of the virus in detention age 27 or something?

Consider how few 27 year olds died, yet the first fatality of a named person happened to be a young man- meaning the world thought it could kill anybody, when the reality was you were about as likely to be killed by a meteorite if you were an averagely healthy 27 year old.

However he died, if he even existed, it was not from Covid. I remember when the first tranch of footballers were reported to have tested positive and wondering if they would ever return to the top level again, such was the hysterical nonsense that even a non fatal brush with the virus could lead to permanent long effects.

odyssey06

Yep and theres the self discrediting conspiracy theory. Its like 2020 all over.

PTH2009

Looking back we were too cautious in large parts of 2021 felt it was more or so to do with weak leadership and the biased media. That shite in place for Christmas/NY was shambolic. They really lost the plot

It was scary how fast everything was 'shut down' and then one Friday evening it was suddenly 'All over'

CalamariFritti

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121691956#Comment_121691956

I mean I'm taking you with a grain of salt for a long time now. There is a bit of a zealot there, you may be gone too far to notice. Not judging...theres gotta be all sorts.

But you're taking the piss with this one right? Because if not this will cast a certain light on everything you said before, you realise that?

odyssey06

Nothing comical or hysterical in how the Guardian reported on it.

Covid can kill you in the street by a heart attack or stroke. Medical staff exposed to high viral load treating patients at close contact without PPE could get severe covid.

No reason to doubt the image etc is actually of a dead person. So no laughing matters here.

The Chinese tried to spin covid as more like ebola. But that is off topic for this thread.

facehugger99

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121693194#Comment_121693194

"Covid can kill you in the street"

Scary that lads like this and their ilk were let dictate policy and erode our civil liberties for over 2 years.

Other things that can 'kill you in the street' include cars, lighting bolts and marshmallows if you happen to choke on one while walking to the shops.

odyssey06

So the winner of the most hysterically (or is it most comical) false comparisons with covid, an infectious disease which killed millions and put millions into hospitals is ... marshmallows. That really takes the biscuit (for VAT related purpoes). It's a new one alright.

Last time I checked neither car crashes or lightning bolts are infectious.

People with long covid has an increased risk of mortality from heart attacks, from strokes. This is all well established factual information.

On the one side we have marshmallows.

On the other side we have actual scientists writing: COVID-19 is known to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-sars-cov-2-contributes-heart-attacks-strokes#:~:text=COVID%2D19%20is%20known%20to,also%20affects%20blood%20vessels%20directly.

thedeer

I thought this was hilarious.......

https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40730124.html

prunudo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121693715#Comment_121693715

It really was a crazy time.

darconio

Back on topic

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121696883#Comment_121696883

The glass screens in takeaways are still a permanent reminder of the madness. I suppose they will come down eventually down the years as renovations are done.

Former Former Former

The funniest part of this is that the people who were so against the public health measures are the very ones who can't move on with life, railing against the injustice of it all, two years after all the meaningful restrictions were lifted.

It's almost as though the Covid thing is a sideshow and you're just bitter sad people, who want to moan about everything and anything.

The war is over lads. Time to come out of the jungle.

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121698670#Comment_121698670

Are you actually that monumnentally thick?

Pretty much every social malaise we currently have is a direct result of lockdown, at least partially.

House price surge. House prices had effectively flatlined in Dublin to a somewhat affordable level by late 2019.

Cost of food and basic goods, the surge began in late 2021 but was on fire up until about maybe last Spring- it's now permanently locked where it is.

We have far more premature deaths in the post Covid era than during Covid. Nobody cares to ask why, and we don't get nightly death tolls at 6pm.

You say to move on yet there probably hasn't been a bigger factor in this country regarding the decline of private home ownership than the Covid lockdowns. You might as well tell the Jews to get over the Holocaust.

Am I over lockdown? Mentally, no, I'm not. If you never had a life to begin with it was quite manageable- the rest of us lived with bouts of unemployment, house arrest (may as well have been, there's only so many times you can go hill walking TBH) and scientists given regular airtime to predict that things like gigs, live sport and pubs might never fully return in the format we were used to.

Sam McConkey was allowed a spot to claim a full re opening was five years away, this was in Spring 2021 when the US was already largely fully re opened. And if Omicron never happened he might just have been listened to.

And the sheep in this country would have been more than happy to put up with that.

PTH2009

This ballax, The poor fucker was stuck here and suddenly he was the hero

https://m.independent.ie/news/irelands-lockdown-hero-matt-damon-snapped-filming-in-tipperary/39572441.html

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121701064#Comment_121701064

I believe this coincided with certain talentless journalists losing their collective minds because a few pronoun weirdos on Twitter had the journalist think that the Irish public had lost their minds because Paul Mescall had worn a pair of O'Neills shorts on a chick flick TV show aimed at graduates. When in reality "actor wears gah shorts on foreign TV show" isn't all that strange- anybody who has been to Thailand will have been initially dumbstruck to see full moon party bar staff wearing Irish regional sportswear forgotten down the years by departing backpackers.

They really did latch on to the strangest things. "Hollywood actor shops in Supervalu".

Where do you think he would shop when based in SE Dublin while filming at Ardmore?

Wal Mart?

There's probably 4 or 5 Hollywood actors renting in the area as I type, to no fanfare.

Or maybe there isnt. Maybe Damon told them to commute from London because the Irish media will run a 12 page spread on you if you are seen doing something so out of character as eating a Supermacs.

Cheddar Bob

Does anybody recall the dread when we first heard about Omicron, just as they were there promoting one more round of the booosters to finally kick Delta out of the country, the absolute glee on the usual heads to announce that there was a new strain in South Africa, heavily vaccine resistant and more infectious than ever before.

The party started to cool, and infact turn to "don't listen to her" rage in some quarters, when a South African medic kept spoiling things by giving interviews adamantly declaring that while highly infectious, this thing was about as much harm as a boot in the hole from a daddy longlegs, and even raised the probability that mass infection with such a mild virus was a vaccine in itself.

I think the usual suspects here tried to cling on for dear life to the craic they were having (the masks, the restricted pubs, the general malaise)- unfortunately for them quite literally the entire population had caught Omicron by mid January, convincing many of the even most ardent isolators and hold outs that we all catch Covid eventually, that it made them less than sick, and that the madness needed to stop.

Because almost overnight we went from a state of war to announcing that we would be fully re opened by....strangely I can't fully recall the date the shackles largely came off, was it Jan 25th?

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121693278#Comment_121693278

There was no "eroding of civil liberties". We took measures to stop a virus from spreading, just like 1918. Whether or not you agreed with those measures, none were political. That's the most hysterical part of this, people thinking that the "guvment" was taking away their freedoms and all that malarkey.

With 20/20 hindsight I or anyone can nitpick through every measure and criticise certain aspects, however at the time, when faced with a new disease, spreading rapidly, people dying, most countries naturally erred on the side of caution.

deirdremf

For me the funniest thing about the whole covid episode was that as the pandemic was taking hold governments all over Europe were encouraging international travel as if there was no tomorrow.

I remember people all over the world were encouraged to travel home from whatever foreign country they were on holiday in or doing business in - bringing any illness they had picked up there with them. However, the second bit of that sentence was glossed over ...

In Ireland the second funniest thing was the arrival of thousands of Italians who were coming for a rugby match, so important for them to travel despite Italy being the biggest focus of the disease in the whole of Europe at the time.

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121701257#Comment_121701257

If you think that NPHET did not have ideas about permanently reforming Ireland's traditional relationship with the pub in their minds when they took their actions I have a bridge to sell you.

Only for there would have been too much legal argument about what is a pub and what is a restaurant we would never have even had them partially re open at any stage before mid 2021 if even that.

As for motivations, we were the only country in Europe to shut down building sites. Any half competent economist would tell you, and without a doubt told the government, that shutting down building sites, coupled with leaving one tranch of prospective homebuyers unemployed while the other remained fully paid with nowhere to spend it (so increased savings) would lead to supply issues and create price hyperinflation.

Houses near me that would go for 230- 250 in early 2020 now go for 330 to 380.

The primary driver in that increase was lockdown.

For all their bluster it is the policy of this government to make home ownership, particularly in large urban areas, a privilidge rather than an achieveable expectation.

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121701257#Comment_121701257

No erosion of civil liberties eh?

There was genuine talk of employment restrictions on those who refused to take a vaccine.

One fruitcake in Beaumont was demanding that no surgery be performed on vaccine holdouts. This nutjob.

dr dilly little - Google Search

While the right to assemble and protest was suspended, omissions were granted on two occasions to BLM protestors. Either all large public gatherings were dangerous and these events likely killed people, or they were never dangerous, so the rest of us should have been allowed to gather.

Rules for thee but not for me and ye it would seem.

Running the risk of being refused employment or surgery by way of your vaccine choice is by any definition a denail of ones liberties.

Cheddar Bob

Here's another one which, although not Covid related in itself as it happened in the last days of the Covid era, gives a glimpse into the minds that ruled during it, and what sort of society they would run if they were allowed free rein.

Huge reaction to Prof Sam McConkey's suggestion men may need 'licence' to socialise - SundayWorld.com

But Dohnjoe there says that taking away civil liberties was never on their mind.

Between this and Aodhan O'Riordan on RTE the other week implying it is time to take our car keys from us by force, the Covid era showed a lot of lunatics that anything is possible.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121701622#Comment_121701622

If you want to believe there was a secret conspiracy by the health service to attack pub culture, cool, you can. Can add it to the mountain of paranoid hysteria about the pandemic. Nothing to do with cases spiking, ICUs packing up, health professionals exhausted and national health systems under immense pressure, nope a global conspiracy against pubs and, by a remarkable coincidence, other places where people congregate during a pandemic.

PTH2009

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121701852#Comment_121701852

How come in the early months 'essential staff' had the time to sing and dance, write poems etc

They had a very hard time of it no doubt and deserved the plaudits

We had our 'leaders' over at gigs in the UK in the summer of 2021 while the government they run refused such events with some thanks to 'projected numbers from NPHET'

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121701861#Comment_121701861

How come in the early months 'essential staff' had the time to sing and dance, write poems etc

Like any profession some people had some down time. Reading on nursing forums, the majority didn't, more than a few seem embarrassed by that fad.

bucketybuck

There is no story so comical or hysterical that certain people won't try to justify regardless. Its a religion to some.

My favourite continues to be that they stopped children going to cul camps, because kids playing outside would be so dangerous.

The worst continues to be that they stopped people being with their husbands and wives as they died. And stopped men being with their wives when children were born.

The sick **** actually did that.