Strategy - Poll

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Interesting, seems to be a 'don't try' message. Last July Ireland had it down to such low numbers that I wonder how it would have been if there was mandatory quarantine and policing of the border instead of policing of people being within 5km of home like now. Australia and new Zealand, if they shut travel off completely would have successfully eradicated it

Australia and New Zealand don't have a truck based trade with 400m people, all their trade is done by container or bulk freighter so its easy for them to quarantine arrivals.

How do we treat haulers crossing numerous boarders to bring our essentials and export all our excess food if you want to quarantine all arrivals?

Essentially what we could have done was ban all travel into the country. If you have to come in (and it would have to be a pretty ****ing good reason), you are shoved into a hotel for 2 weeks.

The armed forces should have been sent north to Man the Border. A shoot to kill policy for anyone caught trying to sneek in. Truck delivery drivers can be led to service areas. Trucks unloaded onto Irish trucks and away they go back from the ports or border area.

Another thing that could have been done was to say to Boris Johnson was to close your flipping borders and we could have had a collective bubble between the 2 islands. But Micheal Martin doesn't have the sufficient testosterone to come out and say something like that.

We could have had this whole thing shut down over the summer.

Stay as is rolling lockdowns, vaccinate 80% of population, open up when health service can cope and deaths are reduced to 10 a week or less.

froog wrote: »

I mean what have we got to lose with zero covid, just go for it.

How long we need such an approach is the unknown - if you say 12 weeks and you're still in it in week 20, it's a failure.

Deleted User wrote: »

As opposed to the rip roaring success the government strategy has been so far


Last time we followed government plans for a bare minimum open up,we ended up with highest infection rate in the world and bones of 8 or 900 dead already this month.....the living with covid plan is a failure,its time to try something new

Well, NPHET say no and government say no to Zero COVID. There is no one perfect strategy, unless you can lock down millions of people as China has done. Whatever strategy any country uses, we are all in a holding patterns for vaccines. That is the end strategy and there is no point flipping at this point.

titan18 wrote: »

I'm kind of half and half.

The strict border control and quarantine doesn't really affect me so if they want to do that, that's fine, but at the same time, I can't really handle a lockdown of the length needed to get to zero covid. Fine if we did this last year, but after 10 months of lockdowns, it's hard to handle another 6-7 month stint of a hard lockdown that would be required to get to zero covid.

If the vaccines don't work, i'm not exactly sure life is worth living anyway if we're stuck like this for years no matter what approach we take.

If the vaccines don't work, (and judging by the doom and gloom from politicians, they don't seem to have much faith in them), it's time to pack it in and go all out for herd immunity.

We have sacrificed a year of our lives for the elderly. We have lost jobs (I have lost 2), businesses gone bust, relationships broken, it has sent people to be mentally on the brink, some people broken, normal health treatments cancelled for over a year, sending as many to their deaths that could have made it. We cannot continue to live like this to save people from a virus that mostly seems to kill people over their 80s. The average covid age of death in the UK is 82. The average life expectancy is 81.

I don't think people realise how long we'd need to be in level 5 to achieve 'zero covid', with no guarantee of it happening. NZ & AUS never at any point had the level of cases we currently have

Regarding the north. Since the issue seems to be solely travel from Britain that the unionists do not want to prohibit, an idea might be to enforce the mandatory hotel quarantining for all other countries to start. And then use another less intrusive measure for British travel, ie home quarantining with daily checks, similar to the polish model.

The south could also have some measure in place up there if we both shared our passenger arrival forms, and people planning on crossing the border from the airport would be immediately flagged.

There is a lot that could be tried but frustratingly there is zero political will from our goverment.

The scientific community, as well as 90 % of the public are calling for strict hotel quarantining now. The goverment are supposed to represent us, what the **** are they playing at? They are exposing us to unnecessary risk.

People are dying, businesses are being ruined, everyones living in fear. This could all be prevented.

Open up. Our Govt has borrowed over 220bn euros since this began to put half our country out of work and businesses shut for past 10 months. It was an experiment and it failed (as I understand it, no one ever tried a full nation wide lockdown to counter-act a before the Chinese in Wuhan)

Imagine what we could've been if we invested that amount into tangible improvments / outright reform of our healthcare system? Instead it looks like we wasted it to maintain a zombie economy.

People are saying now's the time for a zero-COVID strategy? I think it's too little too late for that one, unfortunately

See you all in October during the next Budget measures. Don't forget the lube...

Zero covid is impossible in Ireland for all the reasons already stated 100s of times here and by the government.

Vaccinate the vulnerable groups and then open up, live with it, end of story.

Concentrate only on the old and vulnerable for vaccine rollout.

Stalling the reopening to vaccinate healthy non risk people is a waste of time and to be honest a waste of a vaccine too.

Start counting recently positive tested people along with vaccinations. They have anti-bodies for now, we can top them up with a vaccine later.

Maybe introduce an air purification/ventilation solution in indoor social spaces to help lower spread of air borne pathogens and virus. (*not expected to stop spread completely)

Phase out the mandatory masks. Although as they're widely accepted in culture now the option is always there for anyone that wants to wear them permanently.

Closing down countries in fear of new strains that don't even exist yet is bat**** crazy beyond belief.

That its being considered just goes to show how normalised warped thinking has become.

Deleted User wrote: »

New Zealand and Australian experience shows that zero covid is possible, with huge effort, but is not successful with half hearted efforts.

Ireland may be about to get the worst of both worlds

Do you think it's pure coincidence that not a single country on the whole of this half of the planet has achieved it? It's purely down to the miraculously identical achievements of the NZ and Australian governments, even though NZ has a left wing government and Australia has a right wing government and they generally have few policy similarities?

Meanwhile not a single country on this half of the entire globe, from Ireland to Israel, Switzerland to Sweden, Portugal to Poland, Canada to Croatia, USA to UK, has managed to come close to the same thing.

Yet somehow it's all just because Ireland specifically is doing it all wrong, and nothing to do with the one thing that Aus and NZ have in common, which is that they're extremely isolated countries in the middle of the Pacific ocean thousands of miles away from anywhere else, which is something we simply can't replicate.

quokula wrote: »

Do you think it's pure coincidence that not a single country on the whole of this half of the planet has achieved it? It's purely down to the miraculously identical achievements of the NZ and Australian governments, even though NZ has a left wing government and Australia has a right wing government and they generally have few policy similarities?

Meanwhile not a single country on this half of the entire globe, from Ireland to Israel, Switzerland to Sweden, Portugal to Poland, Canada to Croatia, USA to UK, has managed to come close to the same thing.

Yet somehow it's all just because Ireland specifically is doing it all wrong, and nothing to do with the one thing that Aus and NZ have in common, which is that they're extremely isolated countries in the middle of the Pacific ocean thousands of miles away from anywhere else, which is something we simply can't replicate.

This is it. How tf anyone thinks zero covid is a viable strategy anywhere in the world outside of these 2 countries is ridiculous. Its on the way to being endemic everywhere. They cant reopen their borders normally without being inundated with cases, and they are still locking down various regions on a fairly regular basis as soon as they get a few cases. Non citizens have basically been purged from the country or left to fend for themselves without any entitlement to benefits. There are over 25000 people waiting to get back to their own country. Most people can't leave. This is not "normal life".

You know who are pretty much living normally? The US. they look to be one of the first countries to actually "beat" covid with actual herd immunity, through both infections and vaccines. And the UK is probably 2nd, although they arent anywhere near back to normal right now.


https://asiatimes.com/2021/01/us-likely-to-be-first-western-nation-to-crush-covid-19/

Nz and Aus have just kicked the can a lot further than the rest of the world but I dont think they can avoid it. They'll still be dealing with it long after everywhere else is done.

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Will they not just vaccinate their populations?
I know where id rather be now anyway




Thailand,singapore,taiwan,vietnam among others have persued similar stragidies with great success


It looks,fairly obvious to me the responce in the west has been totally inadequate

The most widely used vaccines haven't been proven to actually stop transmission or infection. Ive already read of several cases of people being infected after full vaccination. They have practically zero immunity. If it gets in, particularly into care homes as seems to be the weak points the world over, it will rip through.

I'm in the US. Between here and Ireland I know where I'd rather be now, even though I want to get home to see my family. Its been hard for them to go through the lockdowns, they havent even been able to see each other for the best part of a year, let alone me on the other side of the world. Meanwhile life here has been normalish since may of last year. As in, we can go to bars, restaurants, hotels, casinos, parks, all shops open etc, anywhere in America we want to go to we can (we havent gone anywhere). We've been wearing masks inside and outside since June. Hospitals haven't been overwhelmed, medical care for other issues hasnt been stopped. My child has been back at school continually since August with one case in the entire school so far that didn't pass it on to anyone else.(They wear masks, are separated into cohorts etc.) I think we have been successfully living with the virus. I know maybe 3 people who have had it and they are all ok now even though all of America should be dead right now according to the predictions on here last year.

Deleted User wrote: »

The death and infection rate among most vulnerable in Israel fell 95%.....this is an endorsement of vaccination programme for me anyway



I don't think the 450K death toll in America is worth it myself....I don't think the 1000 dead here for opening up for Xmas was worth it either, but each to their own i guess

A NY times piece on Israel, stressing that data, while it seems good, is still preliminary.

Early results show a significant drop in infection after just one shot of a two-dose vaccine, and better than expected results after both doses.

Public health experts caution that the data, based on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, is preliminary and has not been subjected to clinical trials.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/world/middleeast/israels-vaccine-data.html