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

Sconsey

Shouldn't we all be dead with heart disease from the vaccine by now?

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121707986#Comment_121707986

Masks were required outdoors never mind indoors in the Paris region and parts of Spain.

Can anybody recall them having dramatically reduced Covid cases?

What about Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, where masking and social distancing is already part of the culture for one half of the population, where bars and nightclubs don't exist, where only half of the population are allowed attend large public events like live sport.

Covid, eventually, was going to and did get everybody. Everybody.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121707986#Comment_121707986

I see this thread has become a lightning rod for all the well known Boards anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers.

It's pretty straightforward, when you talk or cough or sneeze, you exhale droplets and aerosols. That is how Covid is chiefly transmitted. Masks reduce that, and also the load. It's one of the reasons, for example, why we saw seasonal flu dramatically decrease over that period.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121707538#Comment_121707538

We had plenty of issues, and as mentioned multiple times now, anyone can spend forever cherry-picking out particular things to nitpick with 20/20 hindsight (which is 99% of this thread) in order to project a tiresome narrative "X country was the worst".

We were relatively in line with most other countries and we didn't do anything too dramatically different.

The government were extremely and even overly cautious, because of course they were, most were, it was 2020, global pandemic, new disease. Poll after poll at the time (2020) showed decent to strong public support for most government actions and handling.

jackboy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121710571#Comment_121710571

It was the level 5 lockdown that crashed the flu numbers.

Masks do work as you say. However, without a level 5 lockdown they are not enough to stop Covid quickly running through a population. This is exactly what we saw when we stopped the lockdown but continued to wear masks. Yes, a mask can stop you getting covid in a single event, but if you are exposed multiple times a day every day, you are getting Covid, mask or no mask.

pjohnson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121710102#Comment_121710102

I'm amazed there wasn't a horror movie made over the €8 meal such was the tales of horror and woe it caused on the "pintmen". And of course Pubs would never open again.

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121710102#Comment_121710102

If the vaccine doesn't get you, or you don't choke to death in your mask, or overdose on hand sanitizer ... then surely the marshmallows will get you. We were told on the thread how lethal they were. But keep shovelling the malaria and horse medicine into you, be grand.

dalyboy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121710815#Comment_121710815

We were told how lethal Covid was too. That was from “official” sources & the biggest conspiracy theory of the entire debacle.

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121711100#Comment_121711100

Covid was lethal. Millions died from it, millions into hospital. This is just "hysterical" conspiracy theory nonsense. It would be comical too, if we weren't talking about deaths.

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121710672#Comment_121710672

"pubs would never open again"

Leo Varadkar refused to comment on whether life would ever return to exactly where it was in 2019.

Sam McConkey was given a platform to claim we would be in some form of restrictions up to 2026 and maybe further.

Simon Harris said in April 2020 that he couldn't see pubs re opening without mass vaccine roll out, which at the time nobody was realistically expecting before 2023, if ever.

Until Omicron swept in and spoiled the party, the idea that pubs might never re open in the format we all know and loved was a policy some establishment heads predicted and members of government refused to comment on.

Hardly a conspiracy theory to argue that.

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121711100#Comment_121711100

What was it, 7% of the infected could die?

20% would develop blood clots?

Long Covid?

jackboy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121711512#Comment_121711512

In fairness I think the earliest predicted death rate was about 2%. That was fair enough as the data did not exist at that time.

I would forgive everything from the first 6 months of the pandemic as it was not realistic to predict what would happen. However, stuff like locking up beaches during the second summer of the pandemic was unforgivable.

Dick phelan

Lots of people die of the flu. We don't close down the country because of it

dalyboy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121711512#Comment_121711512

And the people dropping dead on the streets. Curtesy from our oooh so honest and totally innocent Chinese CCP media. I howled in laughter at all the gullible Irish lapping it up like mother’s milk. It was like an old fake hidden camera show. Actors walking down the road and dropping dead. It was only missing a laughter backing track to finish off the hilarity.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121712234#Comment_121712234

Flu isn't new. We have vaccines, we have built up resistances, we know a lot about it.

Covid was new, we didn't know a lot about it, it was spreading rapidly and people were dying. Later on, national health systems came close to collapse.

Now Covid it isn't new, we have vaccines and we know a lot about it.

bucketybuck

The Covid era also introduced the term "stakeholders" to the national vocabulary, and it has never really left.

Its the Mis-stakeholders that they should be introducing, but that would require a full public enquiry and we all know how desperate they are to avoid any of that.

Lads in here spending years of their lives defending every little thing covid related while the people who made the decisions don't want to answer a single question about it. Who are the fools there.

Dohnjoe

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121711512#Comment_121711512

Strange, never came across these figures. When Covid first hit there was initially a lot of speculation, but as time went on we generally sorted fact from fiction. The same with most things.

The revisionism is getting more than a little comical. "Remember when they said Covid had a 50% fatality rate and that we'd all have live in a permanent state of lockdown" "Yeah lol".

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121712447#Comment_121712447

This was the hysterical speech from Leo Varadkar announcing lockdown in March 2020:

The vast majority of us who contract Covid-19 will experience a mild illness

And more hysteria:

It is important to remember that the disease effects will be mild for the majority of people, especially the young and healthy.

We know that older people and those with chronic diseases are at real risk.

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/leo-varadkars-washington-dc-speech-in-full-1094844.html

This hysterical messaging was all over the HSE website... most cases will be mild.

normanoffside

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121716666#Comment_121716666

So why did they lock healthy people down for two years?

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121718018#Comment_121718018

It's a highly infectious disease.

dalyboy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121718556#Comment_121718556

The flu is also highly infectious . Norman’s question still applies.

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121718653#Comment_121718653

Nope. Covid is both more infectious and more severe than Flu. Flu vaccines available, immunity from previous waves - did not apply to Covid for 2020 and vaccines only started rolling out in 2021.

The main point being it is infectious - was it relation to young healthy people. They can spread it.

Do we lock down vulnerable people for flu? Why not? Why dont you answer the question then?

You dont because...

They already know this, it having been pointed out numerous times in media and on this forum. The question doesnt apply because it was asked and answered dozens of times already.

So its not #justtheflu, self discrediting nonsense.

Nor were we in "lockdown" for 2 years.

And despite the hysterical warnings it would happen - nor did we lockdown foreva.

pjohnson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121718653#Comment_121718653

It hasn't applied for years.

Former Former Former

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121718653#Comment_121718653

Flu has been around every winter for as long as every human being on the planet has been alive.

No person in history had ever had Covid-19 until, well, 2019.

That’s the difference.

Honestly lads, this thread is the medical equivalent of not knowing what a tracker mortgage is.

Cheddar Bob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121718796#Comment_121718796

By my count we were in near on full lockdown (retail, haircuts, social outlets) for about 9 months out of 23, with it being threatened almost daily for pretty much all of the remaining 15.

Pubs were fully shut for well over a year for most of us. 12 out of 23. In the time they were open we endured 9 euro meals, 1hr 40 minute visits and at one stage 8pm closing times (well, officially, thankfully some places evaded the rules)

Nightclubs were, I believe, probably open for about 3 weeks out of 23 months.

Your revisionism is something else.

Cheddar Bob

Another comical one lads.

Do you remember we all got posted a big detailed pull out poster outlining what was and was not to be open and allowed during 5 different restriction levels? Stage 1 2 3 4 5. Set in stone lads, for clarity and to avoid confusion.

The system was active about three days when they announced that while we were still in stage 3, we were to add elements of 4 into the stage 3 (to do with pubs, I would imagine)

Comical stuff.

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121732403#Comment_121732403

So we weren't in lockdown for 2 years? Were we? 9 months out of 23. Not even close.

So how am I engaged in 'revisionism'? Yeah it is something else - it is the facts of the situation which your own post proves we were not in lockdown for 2 years.

Nightclubs closed, pub sitting linked meals etc - those are not lockdowns.

Trying to misrepresent that as a lockdown is revisionism, "hysterical" at that.

Cluedo Monopoly

Did we ever figure out why people bought so much toilet roll? I saw many people coming out of shops with nothing but toilet roll.

odyssey06

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121732865#Comment_121732865

Worries about supply chains for imported goods, non perishable product that you'll use eventually and diarrhea being one of the listed symptoms... with the restrictions on shops and people travelling about, if you got such a dose you didn't want to be worrying about having to try to get to the shops or someone trying to bring you stuff.

Former Former Former

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121732865#Comment_121732865

This started in Australia IIRC. Pictures went viral on social media of empty shelves and trolleys laden down with bog roll, and this had a knock-on effect in other countries.

In fairness, that was only in the first few weeks of the pandemic, when no-one really knew what was going to happen.