Covid 19 Part XXIV-37,063 ROI (1,801 deaths) 12,886 NI (582 deaths) (02/10) Read OP

To be fair, staphylococcus aureus is endemic, part of our skin flora and has been with us probably for millions of years. Our immune systems are “aware” of it and are normally quite capable of managing it, as is the case with thousands of other bacteria and viruses. It’s only a problem when it gets past the defences.

The key phrase in reference to coronavirus is NOVEL meaning new. We don’t have hundreds, thousands or millions of years of familiarity with it and in too many cases, our immune systems don’t seem to know what to do with it when it hits, which is why it’s either overwhelming people or they’re going into cascades of immune problems and damage.

This is why the damn thing is such a problem.

The virus itself is quite manageable, if you’re a bat that has as much immunity to it as we have to staphylococcus aureus.

Some of these comparisons being made with the flu and common illnesses are ridiculous.

We do have to live with it. We will have to adapt and I don’t think we have faced the reality that we need to come up with something better than crude lockdowns but that also means people need to cop the hell on and start using PPE and social distancing. Instead, we get a bunch of conspiracy theorists who are quite honestly not all there in the head, ranting and raving about use of masks, basic PPE and then others who won’t adhere to the most simple guidelines because they don't give a toss.

If everyone cleaned their hands, wore a mask while mingling and took basic precautions in a consistent and logical way, we wouldn’t have this scale of problem and could manage it better.

Instead we (and not just Ireland) managed to suppress the virus with social distancing and a fire break basically and then all patted ourselves on the back - job well done! We all deserve a nice rest and “boom” the virus is back and everyone is surprised.

Humans aren’t quite there yet with the intelligence to deal with something like this. We would rather bury our heads in the sand and blame someone else than actually take some personal responsibility and get on with life with masks and hand sanitiser for a couple of years.

Yeah it’s annoying. It’s tough. It goes against the grain of what we normally do and how we usually live but life isn’t perfect and being annoyed with the world and selecting facts sourced from dubious online sources to suit your own narrative so you can pretend to be in your happy space isn’t going to fix coronavirus.

We'll have vaccines in the short to medium term (2 year horizon) in the meantime we have to just muddle through and we are not going to do that by just continuously yo-yoing from peak to valley to peak to valley for the next year or more. This needs consistency and it needs fact based discussions.

WoollyRedHat wrote: »

Presumably that's how they managed to locate sewage with high rates of virus to one specific dorm in.American university and quarantine them.

Possibly, or they're doing serial testing of samples of students.

Some universities in the UK are doing aggregated/group tests, where they take swabs from multiple random people e.g. say a group of 10 and test them together in one test kit. If that shows up as negative, they're all assumed to be fine. If it turns up as positive, they call the 10 people for individual tests.

The use of that has reduced the number of test kits needed by a very large factor and you can better target your resources.

Seems like a very logical way of doing mass testing of asymptotic groups.