Covid 19 Part XXXIII-231,484 ROI(4,610 deaths)116,197 NI (2,107 deaths)(23/03)Read OP

Natterjack from Kerry wrote: »

Yes, that's the current position. And I note Ireland is not top of the current table. You refer to the Irish govts response record throughout the pandemic, which would be a different set of data. Why do you quote the data above that is not relevant to the conclusion you have drawn, presumably from some other data set ?

Ireland has had the strictest and longest lockdown in Europe, you will note that the three countries ranked before Ireland on the world scale are not in Europe.

I believe with current measures in mind, the UK temporarily surpassed Ireland for a few days over the last week or so, but as they are beginning to lift their restrictions by allowing people to meet outdoors to socialise tomorrow (and groups of 6 in two weeks time), we will take the leaderboard again.

Throughout the pandemic we have had among the most severe of restrictions, yet we are no better off from it. With almost half of all deaths occurring in nursing homes alone (as per PP), our response clearly didn’t protect the people that it was supposed to protect.

Jim_Hodge wrote: »

Again, I'll ask...have you looked at the stats for other countries? List the best 5 or 6 and the worst few after ourselves. What league table are you using as a source?

I believe only two other countries had more deaths in the over 65’s age group than we did. The UK’s current lockdown is as strict as ours, though past lockdowns in 2020 were far more lax, they were pretty much open for business last summer.
And they have the benefit of an exit plan, which we do not have.

I know overall our death rate isn’t as bad as other countries, but clearly lockdown didn’t protect the people in the care homes and hospitals like the government said it would. They said we needed these strict & lengthy measures to stop infection & prevent deaths and that clearly didn’t happen.
We held up our end of the bargain but it doesn’t seem to have done much to protect these people, certainly when you consider other countries didn’t lockdown for as long or as hard as us, but had fewer deaths.

SusieBlue wrote: »

Ireland has had the strictest and longest lockdown in Europe, you will note that the three countries ranked before Ireland on the world scale are not in Europe.

I believe with current measures in mind, the UK temporarily surpassed Ireland for a few days over the last week or so, but as they are beginning to lift their restrictions by allowing people to meet outdoors to socialise tomorrow (and groups of 6 in two weeks time), we will take the leaderboard again.

Throughout the pandemic we have had among the most severe of restrictions, yet we are no better off from it. With almost half of all deaths occurring in nursing homes alone (as per PP), our response clearly didn’t protect the people that it was supposed to protect.

It might or might not be the longest but not the strictest. There’s sweet FA enforcement or policing of it. Certainly not like parts of Spain where for instance you had to show your supermarket receipt to prove you had been to the shop when that’s all that was allowed. We have nothing like the police or armed forces numbers we’d need to do a proper lockdown.

SusieBlue wrote: »

I believe only two other countries had more deaths in the over 65’s age group than we did. The UK’s current lockdown is as strict as ours, though past lockdowns in 2020 were far more lax, they were pretty much open for business last summer.
And they have the benefit of an exit plan, which we do not have.

I know overall our death rate isn’t as bad as other countries, but clearly lockdown didn’t protect the people in the care homes and hospitals like the government said it would. They said we needed these strict & lengthy measures to stop infection & prevent deaths and that clearly didn’t happen.
We held up our end of the bargain but it doesn’t seem to have done much to protect these people, certainly when you consider other countries didn’t lockdown for as long or as hard as us, but had fewer deaths.

Please source your claim.

Ive already put the time in disproving your claims about nursing homes (5% of our nursing home population passed away upto early February compared to 9% of the uk's) so you are moving the goal posts and making claims up about the population over 65.

Ireland deaths per capita 889 per million
Italy deaths per capita 1652 per million

Irish deaths per capita are 53% of Italian deaths per capita. Italian deaths of people age 80 or over are 59% of Italian deaths. Therefore Italy have more deaths per capita in over 80s than Ireland has deaths.


I'm not going to go searching to establish data for you. On a per capita basis Italy has more over 80s dieing than we have total deaths. How can you say only 2 other countries have more deaths in over 65s than we do.

CIARAN_BOYLE wrote: »

Please source your claim.

Ive already put the time in disproving your claims about nursing homes (5% of our nursing home population passed away upto early February compared to 9% of the uk's) so you are moving the goal posts and making claims up about the population over 65.

Ireland deaths per capita 889 per million
Italy deaths per capita 1652 per million

Irish deaths per capita are 53% of Italian deaths per capita. Italian deaths of people age 80 or over are 59% of Italian deaths. Therefore Italy have more deaths per capita in over 80s than Ireland has deaths.


I'm not going to go searching to establish data for you. On a per capita basis Italy has more over 80s dieing than we have total deaths. How can you say only 2 other countries have more deaths in over 65s than we do.

It has already been posted a few times:

Deaths in Ireland among the over-65s were the third highest in Europe relative to population. The rate to early October in Ireland was 2,359 deaths per million. Only Belgium and England/Wales had higher rates of deaths.

This was before the Christmas surge, where the majority of our deaths were in the 65+ age group. I believe we had the highest number of cases in Europe and were hardest hit by the UK variant after opening up for Christmas.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/ireland-had-longest-lockdown-for-pubs-and-restaurants-in-europe-report-1.4414028

Natterjack from Kerry wrote: »

No, Ill just say that that data doesnt show that Ireland lockdown measures have been the severest. You are stating this - you must have the source of that data to hand surely, since you are basing your contention on it ?

It does, I posted the links, you are just choosing to ignore them. Up until the week of the 24th, which was the last time I had checked the Oxford chart, we were ranked 4th in the world and 1st in Europe in terms of lockdown strictness.
We are now ranked 7th in the world and 2nd in Europe, but we will surpass the Uk again in the coming days as they begin lifting their restrictions tomorrow.
I’m not posting the charts again, if you choose to disregard the evidence then I cannot help you.

SusieBlue wrote: »

It does, I posted the links, you are just choosing to ignore them. Up until the week of the 24th, which was the last time I had checked the Oxford chart, we were ranked 4th in the world and 1st in Europe in terms of lockdown strictness.
We are now ranked 7th in the world and 2nd in Europe, but we will surpass the Uk again in the coming days as they begin lifting their restrictions tomorrow.
I’m not posting the charts again, if you choose to disregard the evidence then I cannot help you.

That oxford chart is bull****, it includes metrics which have no bearing on how harsh a lockdown is. If you actually delve into the data source, most data sources have 2 values, 1 or 0, some 1-5. It's not a detailed report.
It's like those estimated projections on worldometer about cases etc...

030802 wrote: »

Ireland has the third highest death rate for over 65s yet...

Countries in Europe that have had about twice Ireland's death rate:

Czechia, Belgium, Slovenia, UK, Montenegro, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, B&H, Bulgaria, N Macedonia, Spain, Slovakia

Countries in Europe that have a death rate about 1.5 times Ireland's:

Croatia, France, Sweden, Lithuania, Poland, Switzerland

Other countries in Europe with a death rate higher than Ireland:

Romania, Luxemburg, Moldova, Austria, Netherlands, Latvia

That does not make any sense.

I've done a dive in the bolded countries statistics websites or statista.com charts. All of them have deaths in their over 70s (or 75s or over 80s) that are a higher % of their population than total Irish deaths are as a % of our population.

If their deaths for over 70s are a higher % of their population than our total deaths are of ours then they must have higher deaths in over 65s than we do.

I think I've spent enough time exploring baseless claims.

Wolf359f wrote: »

That oxford chart is bull****, it includes metrics which have no bearing on how harsh a lockdown is. If you actually delve into the data source, most data sources have 2 values, 1 or 0, some 1-5. It's not a detailed report.
It's like those estimated projections on worldometer about cases etc...

I posted another link that showed our first lockdown was 46 days longer than the next strictest country in Europe, and that our non essential services such as retail, gyms and hairdressers have been closed longer than any other European country too.
Pubs have been opened for a total of 2 weeks over the last year, and they haven’t reopened at all since March 2020 in Dublin.
That wasn’t including the months of regional lockdowns we had before before the 6 week desperate attempt to save Christmas, which as far as I’m aware, no other country did either. Yet all that was sneered at and called irrelevant too.

Wolf359f wrote: »

I don't disagree with the timeline and what was closed, but how do you quantify that as stricter then everyone else.
Pubs are a big part of Irish life, them closed is a big burden on the public. In other countries, the pubs being closed wouldn't be as big a deal. Nightclubs closed here, not many would complain, in Amsterdam they maybe would.
We haven't had strict stay at home orders like Spain and I think Italy, where you could only leave once a week to go to the shops and it was enforced.

A lockdown and how severe it is, has to be measured on the population and it's incomparable to other countries. The fact is, the majority believe we need the restrictions when they are brought in. Towards the end, when cases get lower and lower there's less support. If the majority believe we need certain restrictions, then it's not that severe in the public's eyes.

Then the non-essential retail closed even for click and collect etc... if you ask most people, they think it's silly. They don't say its severe, scandalous, a punishment etc...

Didn’t Mícheal Martin gloat about it himself in one of his pre Christmas address to the nations? Didn’t he say we were in a great position to open up for the festive period because we had endured one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in the world?
That was where I first heard about it anyway. Unless he was lying, but that would be a pretty stupid thing to lie about.

Non essential services have been closed here for longer than any other EU country since the pandemic began. That’s what he was referring to in that speech.

SusieBlue wrote: »

Didn’t Mícheal Martin gloat about it himself in one of his pre Christmas address to the nations? Didn’t he say we were in a great position to open up for the festive period because we had endured one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in the world?
That was where I first heard about it anyway. Unless he was lying, but that would be a pretty stupid thing to lie about.

Non essential services have been closed here for longer than any other EU country since the pandemic began. That’s what he was referring to in that speech.

I'll go by data and not a politician. If he said we had the best testing and tracing system in the world, on par with South Korea.... can we say that's true cause the Taoiseach said it?

MrMusician18 wrote: »

It's really hard to know what case you're making. Is it that lockdowns don't work? Well that is demonstrable false. Is it that we are in the state we're because of government policy re nursing homes? You could argue that case during the first wave perhaps but not really post July 2020. Once the disease is out of control in the community, it will get into nursing homes, unless these homes are completely isolated from the rest of the country. This as you know isn't possible. So then the only way to prevent it getting into nursing homes is to crush it in the community.

You've been against the restrictions since at least last September, so it's really hard to take you seriously now. Have you agreed with any public health policy since then?

But we have crushed it in the community several times over yet even during these periods, hospital and nursing home infections and deaths were still high.
So this is not the fault of the public, and clearly the public sacrifice didn’t make much meaningful impact if infections and deaths in these settings were still high.

I believe we could achieve similar results without such severe and lengthy lockdowns, as other countries have.
I don’t believe pressing the panic button and shutting the country down for months on end is sustainable, or a good solution. I don’t believe it is in the best interests of public health to do this.
I believe this leads to bigger surges when things do eventually reopen, which makes it counter productive.

I disagreed with the October lockdown, I thought leaving retail, gyms and personal services open while closing hospitality would be sufficient to lower the numbers.
The evidence indicated that level 4 was already working before we took out the sledgehammer and went to level 5.
I thought that shutting everything down for almost two months and then briefly reopening for the biggest social and consumer driven time of year would cause a pressure cooker explosion of cases, particularly when threats of lockdown #3 were looming mere days into December.
I think I was right about that.

The January lockdown was warranted to get things under control but I feared that the government would make an absolute balls of getting us out of it, as they had done previously.
11 weeks later with weak speculation about maybe opening construction in April and not lifting the 5k limit until May, and I think I was right on that front too.

Click and collect and construction should be open now, and there should be plans in motion to open non essential retail from April 5th, with gyms and hairdressers following a few weeks later.
I think that, along with allowing people to meet outdoors, would be more than enough leverage to get people on board to follow the rules until we make more progress with the vaccines.
At the moment there is no hope, so people are making their own risk assessments and doing as they please behind closed doors. We can all see it.

We have extremely weak leadership that is more concerned with covering their own arses than they are in acting in the best interests of all citizens.
NPHET are the ones making all the economic, social, educational, and health decisions for the past year, most of which they are completely unqualified to do.

We will clearly never agree on this, and that’s ok.

SusieBlue wrote: »

This was before the Christmas surge, where the majority of our deaths were in the 65+ age group. I believe we had the highest number of cases in Europe and were hardest hit by the UK variant after opening up for Christmas.

According to your consistent argument, restrictions do not work, yet here you say we had a deadly surge following the easing of restrictions at Christmas. So, how do you think we would have fared if we hadn’t reintroduced restrictions following the surge? Why did we have a surge in the first place if restrictions are of no use?

Happydays2020 wrote: »

Another scare article on variants.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-40239275.html

Relies heavily on Gerry Killeen. Hard pass.