Covid 19 Part XXIII-33,444 in ROI(1,792 deaths) 9,541 in NI(577 deaths)(22/09)Read OP

Been catching up again, keeping up to date with this thread is hard work, and depressing at the same time.

What's become clear is that too many posters in this thread are clearly only here or watching RTE, if they were watching anything from outside of Ireland, there might be some understanding of why NPHET are looking to take the action they are.

2 specific examples from the UK today.

Part of South Wales has been locked down, and a significant part of the reason for that the cases have significantly spiked upwards, as the result of the actions of 2 pubs, (now closed) a rugby club and a social trip out by coach on effectively a pub crawl to the races at Doncaster, which they never got to as the pub crawl went so well!

The other case was the North East, the leader of the authority gave an interview on Sky News this morning, asking for Government help, as their tracing process had found 3 areas that meant they needed to lock down to reduce the case load.

The first problem was the number of cases coming from Pubs and hospitality.

The second was the number of cases coming from "house parties".

The third problem area was the number of cases happening as a result of outdoor sports activities.

Looks to me like the problem here is that the tracing system is not actually finding the real reasons, and I find myself thinking that's because the interview process is not asking the questions in a way that gets the real answers, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence here this evening about the way that pubs and restaurants are "massaging" the rules.

Yes, Communions and confirmations have not helped, and although it's not been mentioned here, there have been some schools that in violation of guidelines they were given had combined mass when they restarted.

Speaking personally, and I know it won't be a popular opinion, the sooner we get organised religion out of the education system, the better it will be for many areas of life.

Someone's already mentioned the morning coffee meetings that happen after the mums have dropped the kids to school.

Can't remember if it was in this thread or the Wet pub thread, I mentioned a friend who went into a local wet pub for the first time in a long time, it's been opened by bringing in take away or similar, he walked in, took one look and turned round and walked back out again, the place was rammed, with no separation, people queuing at the bar, and there's plenty of other cases been reported where "the rules" are being seen as flexible guidance.

At some point, the people at the top have to make the hard decisions of how to get things back under some sort of control, they can't ignore the surge that's happening, and it's clear that the present rules are no longer working, regardless of what level you give them, or how you them modify them to meet the specific situation that's happening on the ground.

The underfunded and under resourced hospital systems are still not going to be capable of dealing with the sort of overload that happened in places like Italy and Spain, so action now to reduce the increasing trend has to happen to keep the future deaths as low as possible.

It is that simple. The damage to the economy will be much worse if we end up with the whole country having to go into full level 4 or 5 lockdown, and prevaricating now for too long will make that more likely, far better to go with the changes that are needed, and try to ensure that the PR machine makes the reasons clear, and does whatever it can to get people back on side.

Golfgate for sure didn't help, for all the well discussed reasons, the lack of clarity this week hasn't been good, and the lack of preparation during the lull over the summer has not been good either, and it's clear that the present track and trace system is not delivering clear results in the time needed, and it's also not working as expected, which means that at some point, there needs to be massive change to make the whole health system truly fit for purpose.