Coronavirus Pandemic Information- Local and Worldwide

All this stuff re. our esteemed former Minister for Ag. encapsulates everything that is contradictory and annoying about Covid restrictions for me.

If its as dangerous as we are led to believe then anyone who had Nphet in to meet them personally (Cabinet) either heard something different to what we are being told or are irredeemebly thick.

All this goes back to how much all this affects someone personally.If it has no real impact on your life ie go where you want ,no income issues etc then its all hunky dory.
Does any of this have any real input into the lives of Ministers.people involved with nphet etc?More work perhaps with a major increase in recognition and most importantly funding.Its their time in the Sun and could you blame them for basking in the "reflected glory"

To be honest the only issue I have had so far is no pub(not a drop since 14th March!!).Everything else no real change apart from school closed.Other than that its really been business as usual in farming.

I was in 2 hardware / builder provider stores today. Everyone wearing a mask. Perspex screens up at the counter... workers with screens over their faces. ...And there was a party last night in Galway with over 80 people at it, one of them a minister, all talking sh1te into each other's faces with no precautions.

Water John wrote: »

FFS I'd say Tony Holohan would rather have been at home with his family than working 7 days a week.

That in relation to my post ?

We would all love to stay at home with our families but sometimes life gets in the way.
If you list you must soldier and I would imagine he was/is rather well recompensed for his job (in which lets be honest his track record from the last few years is spotty to say the least)
Kinda like a Teagasc advisor talking about lambing another 200 ewe lambs and while you are arm deep in one of a cold March night he is where?
Easy to make decisions when you know they will have little or no noticable effect on you personally.

Thats always been my issue with "restrictions" Easy to comply when little or nothing is asked of you.Problem now is more and more are asking what the actual f**k we are doing in relation to a disease that is mostly(ok not exclusively)an issue for those at the waiting door

Water John wrote: »

'those at the waiting door'
By this, do you mean, the elderly?

Yup and those with a terminal illness

patsy_mccabe wrote: »

I was in 2 hardware / builder provider stores today. Everyone wearing a mask. Perspex screens up at the counter... workers with screens over their faces. ...And there was a party last night in Galway with over 80 people at it, one of them a minister, all talking sh1te into each other's faces with no precautions.

Wouldn't it be karma if someone was covid positive at that function?

Water John wrote: »

Well I'll let your argument stand and speak for itself.

Think its a pretty good argument nonetheless.
Facts seem to indicate that Covid 19 really is a danger to those nearing the end of their lives or those with a serious illness.
There will always be the odd anomaly of course.

Its things like people all upset when 1 person dies from Corona as if its a "shameful/unnatural/unnecessary/etc etc "death.
People die each and every day and have done since time began.Nothing new there.Its just the cause thats different.Maybe I have a a cold way of looking at things but thats me.

At some stage life has to go on.Yes maybe things will take a while to get back to normal but they will most assuredly will at some time in the future.When Covid is just a dim and distant memory people will still die.

I think its really,to use a very overused phrase, a snowflake thing.People seem to have a view that death is not natural for an elderly person.Yes its sad when it happens but it will happen to us all at some stage.

And before you ask ,yes have an elderly parent here with very serious medical issues over the past 10 years but they are as fcuked up of it as me .Actually they thought and still think,that its a lot of hype with a little substance.

paddysdream wrote: »

Problem now is more and more are asking what the actual f**k we are doing in relation to a disease that is mostly(ok not exclusively)an issue for those at the waiting door

:mad:

Neddyusa wrote: »

With 81 people it's very likely there were several

Current infected rates stand at about 47 per 100,000.

At that rate, the number of people you would have to have present to have 1 infected person, would be just over 2,000..

Would have family who every day with, end of life, situations. The DNR option, when it's right not to have a person suffer any further.

If we conduct ourselves and maintain the three simple measures, hand washing, masks and distance, we can keep the R factor near or below 1. That means it would continue at a low level and almost all activities can take place.

alps wrote: »

Current infected rates stand at about 47 per 100,000.

At that rate, the number of people you would have to have present to have 1 infected person, would be just over 2,000..

47 detected cases per 100k is the new "detected cases" in the past fortnight.

It's a much lower number than the total number that have been infected.

The vast majority of infections are not being detected as people are asymptomatic or have minimal symptoms and therefore are not tested.

emaherx wrote: »

Really?

Its based on 65,000 tests in the past 7 days, (that's a fairly big sample) and they would have been people feeling unwell and known close contacts of confirmed cases so you'd imagine the number is likely higher than the general population.

Well if you want to express new cases in the last week per number of tests its approx 1,000 per 100,000.
Obviously as you say this is a good bit higher than the 47 per 100,000 quoted.

And the PCR testing is only picking up current infections, not for example people who might have been infected in April but tested this week as a contact etc.

My point is that we don't know how many people have been infected to date. The antibody test similarly only identifies people recently infected.
But we do know that the vast majority who get infected are asymptomatic so the actual numbers will always be much higher than the numbers of detected cases.

Quoting the 47 cases per hundred thousand as an indication of the prevalence of the infection in the general population is the equivalent of trying to determine bovine TB in a herd by only presenting 2% of your cows for the herd test.

alps wrote: »

Two things...

47 per 100,000 is the number of people "infectious" at the time..

The question is, what is the multiplier of those who remain asymptomatic or not tested...is x2, x3, x10? Who knows..

We might be able to throw a figure on that if we were given the data as to how many of those close contacts, say in factories, asymptomatic who tested positive, were previously or subsequently became symptomatic...

I'm not sure if you are serious with your TB point, but you know we have the capacity to ask a person if they feel well, which is a really good help in human health diagnostics compared to that of animals..

Absolutely, that's why the news bulletins telling us that "x number" of CV19 cases were announced today, is not really useful information as it cant be extrapolated to the general population, because we don't know what that multiplier is.
Also they don't tell us how many of "x number" of cases were sick/asymptomatic.

As I say, its akin to only testing 2 cows out of 100 and announcing a herd test result. Its meaningless. The cases per 100,000 figure tells us more about the number of tests being done than the actual level of infection.

Being able to tell someone you feel unwell is little advantage in measuring infection rates when so many never have symptoms.

If as you say when they reported on e.g. 100 tests in a meat factory that 80 tested positive and of the 80, 6 showed symptoms and 1 was hospitalized that is more useful information to the public than just telling us "there were 80 cases in the factory".

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

I think a better analogy would be only tb testing herds that border onto positive farms or have visible symptoms in live animals and treating the end result as an accurate representation of what is going on in the country

Is it your thinking that the visible symptoms of TB are as prevalent as the visible signs of COVID?

alps wrote: »

Is it your thinking that the visible symptoms of TB are as prevalent as the visible signs of COVID?

I don't know exactly what the percentage of non visible signs of both. But the general idea that a large portion of total infections can be circulating while remaining under the radar with total positives/trends in positives not necessarily being in any way representative of real infections

Neddyusa wrote: »

Part of the reason for the reluctance to relax restrictions and the slowness of adjusting the polices around managing Covid is that NEPHET is dominated by academics and epidemiologists - i.e. conservative and highly risk averse people by nature and not known for having a good grasp of social or economic considerations.

Instead of academics they should just recruit people from internet forums. We'd have been sorted months ago.