Relaxation of Restrictions, Part III - **Read OP for Mod Warnings**

FintanMcluskey wrote: »

Well they aren't exactly kids at the present time so.

They are adults who never had this upheaval during their formative years.

Irish kids are on course to be a great experiment in mass long term ] quote


Children are more resilient than you give them credit for, and they have online learning down to an art.

It's more the parents I feel sorry for!
Need to get childcare back running somehow or noone is going anywhere.

road_high wrote: »

Thousands more jobs at risk at the Airport. All these job losses piling pressure on our welfare system. Also our health service though medical cards. The negative spin offs are immeasurable from this

...pandemic .

marno21 wrote: »

Herd immunity is the only way out of this mess. Be it through vaccination or a sufficient amount of people contracting the virus and gaining immunity that way.

There have been at least 5 million infections worldwide and a large multiple of this would appear to have antibodies based on seroprevalence studies conducted to date. There has been no evidence yet to prove otherwise which is encouraging.

No country has achieved herd immunity to date, which requires (R0-1/R0) of the population to be infected. However, hard hit areas like NY have shown immunity levels of ~20%. This has a lag also due to the delay in the body producing antibodies and the lag that the study takes to complete. 20% does not provide sufficient population immunity to stop the virus but it does reduce the number of viable hosts that the virus can infect. The higher the percentage with antibodies, the more difficulty the virus has in finding hosts to infect, so the more with antibodies, the less likely the virus will spread as fast. At the start of this pandemic, it spread like wildfire due to 0% of the population having SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (the effect of other coronavirus antibodies being negated here).

I read that research , too Mamo.
It does say also that testing at I intervals later the antibody levels in those that produce them fall off, so not lasting immunity as yet.
Also that only a percentage produce enough antibodies to fight off infection, and not enough if only a mild illness.
Their conclusions were that herd immunity is probably not achievable relying on infection alone but more and longitudinal research is needed.

Mic 1972 wrote: »

Technically this is the first wave, even if we dont know when it started
Second wave will begin when the trend becomes positive again
Most countries are now hitting minimum daily new infections and are reopening so it will take probably 2-3 months before numbers start to pile up again

Great just in time to lock again before we even fully exit the lockdown Haha

Goldengirl wrote: »

I made my point , not allowed?

Fair enough - I just thought you were disagreeing with me.

marno21 wrote: »

Herd immunity is the only way out of this mess. Be it through vaccination or a sufficient amount of people contracting the virus and gaining immunity that way.

There have been at least 5 million infections worldwide and a large multiple of this would appear to have antibodies based on seroprevalence studies conducted to date. There has been no evidence yet to prove otherwise which is encouraging.

No country has achieved herd immunity to date, which requires (R0-1/R0) of the population to be infected. However, hard hit areas like NY have shown immunity levels of ~20%. This has a lag also due to the delay in the body producing antibodies and the lag that the study takes to complete. 20% does not provide sufficient population immunity to stop the virus but it does reduce the number of viable hosts that the virus can infect. The higher the percentage with antibodies, the more difficulty the virus has in finding hosts to infect, so the more with antibodies, the less likely the virus will spread as fast. At the start of this pandemic, it spread like wildfire due to 0% of the population having SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (the effect of other coronavirus antibodies being negated here).

Estimating herd immunity requirements by R0-1/R0 is a very very crude method and will overestimate the amount of infection to slow spread by an awful lot.
Everyone does not have the same potential for exposure, to get infected on exposure or to spread the virus post infection.

Herd suppression of covid will occur at much lower levels than 60-70% of the population having antibodies.

So we are pretty much at the pre-lockdown level of new cases and they wouldn’t let homeware shops open even with the social distancing. So what is it that we’re waiting for now as I lost the plot a little, pretty sure at some stage we were told That all we need to do is to have a bit of restrictions to “flatten the curve” but once it peaks around Easter time we’ll start getting back to “normal”. It’s now over a month after Easter and nothing much happened really.

In the meantime cancer screening services no longer reply to me that they will open as soon as safe but just yesterday I was informed that “ Unfortunately we have no date as to when screening will re-commence”

When we get a handle on the clusters of cases that are still active, which has begun and should take 2 weeks we can expect sometime the week after the June bank holiday to be at single figure deaths and possibly zero cases.

Then the next problem is inward travel from the US and UK primarily, and keeping the country to the plans.

If we hit zero new Daily cases in mid July for successive days it will be a massive challenge to have anything expected to stay closed.

prunudo wrote: »

At 51 cases it must be pretty non existent in the community. At the very least the 5km limit must be lifted before June 8th.

I'd be surprised if this kept up if someone of the stages weren't merged, perhaps 3 and 4 into the same phase.

If they keep low for the next 2 weeks then theres going to be more pressure to open things up quicker

prunudo wrote: »

At 51 cases it must be pretty non existent in the community. At the very least the 5km limit must be lifted before June 8th.

That’s 51 new cases. Going in the right direction yes but there are thousands of cases still in the community. We are about the same amount of active cases as we were at the end of March. That can’t be ignored.

I can understand people's eagerness to lift restrictions, but you do realise we aren't even two days into the first phase, right? They are not going to be making any decisions on the relaxation of any restrictions until they see how the current phase pans out. Two weeks at the earliest.

We are better off than Italy now yet we are going to be months behind catching up to them in terms of getting things open.

You know I personally was very much for all the restrictions and have kept to them wholeheartedly since day 1. However, I and indeed many others, are beginning to grow weary.

A few weeks ago, when this was at it's peak, it was really only the bald headed, 5G conspiracy wielding uneducated nutcases (you know the type) who were really against this thing and feeling like 'der civel libertees were been violated by de caretaker guberment'.

However, this pedestrian lifting of restrictions and a certain air of condescension from the NPHET heads towards the general public who have followed the admittedly necessary draconian restrictions for over 2 months now, will very quickly lose the support of the public. We've been at this for long enough now, we know to wash our hands, to keep our distance, us office workers will continue working from home, hand-shakes are a thing of the past etc etc etc.

Community transmission is virtually extinct (the words of the CMO of our HSE, Dr. Tony Holohan). The risk of getting the disease now is a lot lot lower than it was back in early March when the disease was very much here but our very own government refused to take the necessary measures until being handheld by the WHO declaring it a pandemic. Even then, they stumbled their way into taking the necessary measures, remember that pubs would have opened on St. Patrick's day only for the Vintners to pull the plug voluntarily.

This same government now wants to drag this thing out over the entire summer, continuing the suffering of thousands of people who've been unemployed as a result of this and driving more and more small businesses into permanent extinction. This is now the time when we should all be emerging from a horrible horrible few weeks into a new dawn, seeing friends and family we haven't seen for months and feeling their embrace and enjoying the warmth of their company.

It will remain to be seen but I sincerely sincerely hope that the government can and will accelerate life getting back to normal. More than anything, our normal health service needs to resume as best it can as well. Just wait and see we'll have a massive spike in cancer cases and fatalities in the next few years, a clear secondary tragedy in all this.