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

hmmm wrote: »

What do you mean "hiding"? There's a press conference every few days with our medical experts, the sight of Donnelly's face on TV isn't going to give people any more information than they are already getting. I think there are probably too many press conferences to be honest.

What people want to hear is that this whole nightmare will end very soon, and it would be lie to tell them that. Would you prefer if the government was more like Trump/Johnson and reassure people that this will all go away?

Hopefully as the vaccines roll out we will see things become more normal towards late Summer. There's no point giving false hope for something sooner.

Hiding, as in nowhere to be seen. He is minister of health in the worst pandemic in 100 years. It’s not about giving false hope, it’s about communicating properly. At the moment communications from the government is through endless leaks and individuals spouting nonsense to the media, which is inevitable when the minister of health won’t lead.

jackboy wrote: »

Hiding, as in nowhere to be seen. He is minister of health in the worst pandemic in 100 years. It’s not about giving false hope, it’s about communicating properly. At the moment communications from the government is through endless leaks and individuals spouting nonsense to the media, which is inevitable when the minister of health won’t lead.

I'd argue that, short of resigning, the best thing Donnelly can do for everyone is to stay off the airways - every time he opens his gob publicly he causes a problem

Stormyteacup wrote: »

Pretty spectacular strawman.

I don’t mind people disagreeing with my posts, but one-liner snipes are very irritating. Would you mind developing your point?

Allow me to remind you of the context of the discussion. Gozunda was suggesting that the 5km limit wasn’t really a travel restriction, on the apparent premise that you could travel further if you had a valid reason. I contested that this clearly is a travel restriction and I took issue with the attempt at playing it down. There is hardly anyone in this country who would not agree that a single digit kilometre radius from which no citizen must travel beyond unless they have valid excuse is a pretty far-reaching impingement on their rights.

By way of demonstrating that Gozunda was wrong in trying to water down the restrictions, I pointed out that even at British Army checkpoints these kind of limitations on everyday activity did not apply for the most part in my area in the 90s. This is not comparing the Guards to the British Army — it is simply pointing out that only being able to travel beyond 5km for specific reasons deemed valid by the State is a pretty far-reaching measure.

So ....could you tell me what above is not correct? And please remember that at no point in this post have I delved into whether the travel restrictions are justified or not — I have simply said that they are a serious and severe restriction of constitutional rights, whether one thinks such restriction is justified or not. Do you disagree?

hmmm wrote: »

The government went with the "will of the people" at Christmas and made an absolute pigs ear of it.

I'm pretty sure the government aren't going to be over-ruling NPHET anytime soon, and if I was a politician I wouldn't want to be put back in that position where the media (and in fairness also the people) were asking me when restrictions were going to be eased.

I've no great views on Donnelly himself, but the only thing anyone can do is tell people to keep doing what they're doing, we'll vaccinate as quickly as the vaccines arrive, and we'll see how the situation develops. I'm sure personally they're optimistic about the impact of the vaccines, but they can't come out and promise this.

It still doesn't mean they can abnegate all responsibility on a plan. The trouble with vaccines is that supply issues have already forced us to meet promised targets and "June will be better" will sound hollow the longer that goes on. That's not to say the plan needs to have exact dates on it but some evidence of movement has to come on April 5 or soon thereafter. Martin saying on April 5 he won't make predictions or that May 5 is what they had in mind all along risks losing a lot of public support.

Spring break goes on regardless!

Officials imposed an emergency 8pm-6am curfew for Miami Beach, effective immediately, after hard-partying spring break crowds trashed restaurants, brawled in the streets and gathered in thousands without masks or social distancing, according to authorities.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/21/miami-beach-officials-impose-covid-curfew-to-curb-spring-break-chaos

Faugheen wrote: »

And those press conferences are with civil servants who are being forced to answer questions above their mandate. This is because the actual lawmakers are hiding behind these civil servants and are letting them take all the flak.

As I have been saying, Ronan Glynn is being forced to answer questions about easing restrictions when ultimately it isn’t his decision. The decision-makers are sitting back and taking advantage of his lack of political/diplomatic nous and the backlash that will inevitably come with it.

The government are hiding. They make the decisions here, not NPHET. The problem is people believe NPHET make the decisions when in actual fact the government has spent the best part of a year ignoring them. That’s why we’re still in this mess.

When this is over and questions start to be asked, it is going to be awfully handy to have a whipping boy to direct any anger towards.
The government have abdicated their responsibility to avoid future blame. Instead of bondholders and developers, it will be NPHET and the HSE.

hmmm wrote: »

Looking at the figures I don't think he'll have much choice. He can't relax restrictions on April 5 if cases are plateauing or rising. He can't even hint at it or people will start mixing more in the run-up.

The best thing the government can do now in my opinion is kill off this April 5 idea. Tell people the truth (and in my experience people want to hear the truth and respond if they are asked to do something).

There has to be a trade off of sorts. None looks to be forthcoming. As I've been saying it really doesn't need to be a lot, just an indication of a plan in motion. I disagree on the truth thing BTW, especially if it is no changes till May. Restrictions that people begin to ignore are really not worth the paper they are written on and there is no truth that anyone can produce about vaccines apart from we're not getting any this week.

is_that_so wrote: »

I disagree on the truth thing BTW, especially if it is no changes till May. Restrictions that people begin to ignore are really not worth the paper they are written on and there is no truth that anyone can produce about vaccines apart from we're not getting any this week.

What would you do if you were in their shoes?

If the figures start going up, and you want people to go back to where they were in January/February in terms of contacts, you can't start talking about easing restrictions. You can't even hint at it I think.

Jinglejangle69 wrote: »

So the UK government has urged its citizens not to book foreign holidays amid fears of new stains that can evade the vaccine.

Is that it so?

Is is going to be like this forever?

Years and years of new strains and restrictions.

Yes, thats right. Decades, Centuries even. Until the end of time. Correct.

hmmm wrote: »

The government went with the "will of the people" at Christmas and made an absolute pigs ear of it.

Christmas was a mess created by NPHET who demanded level 5 in October, the day holohan returned to work, even though the rest of NPHET 2 days earlier were happy with level 3.

We went into level 5 in October and got a minor release for 3 weeks in December, with the promise we would be back in level 5 in January.

It was hinted that October level 5 was needed to have a meaningful Christmas. The government knew that they could not retain level 5 for the entirety of December so tried, IMO, to ease restrictions in a controlled way to try and keep some control, but messed it up.

But government is about making decisions based on information and evidence available. Just because you took decision A and the outcome was Z, does not mean making decision A again will result in decision Z again especially as the factors and evidence now are different. We have vaccines now which we didnt have in December.
Infections among our HCWS has dropped significantly since vaccination, which tallies with the info from the UK.

We are in a different and better place than last december and that must be factored into the government decision making but it appears we are ignoring the evidence.

Gael23 wrote:

Went to visit my vaccinated grandparents yesterday. Not one checkpoint on the 30 minute drive each way

Is there many cases in that county?

hmmm wrote: »

What would you do if you were in their shoes?

If the figures start going up, and you want people to go back to where they were in January/February in terms of contacts, you can't start talking about easing restrictions. You can't even hint at it I think.

I think there does need to be some recognition of the nature of Christmas though. Even in a normal year people are mixing and piling into shops, dinners, houses etc much more than they do at any other time of the year.
Part of the frustration is that the government is constantly using the Christmas break as a means of justifying the ongoing severity of the restrictions when there is very reasonable grounds for saying that giving people a phased bit of leeway is not necessarily the same as just opening everything at what is by far the most sociable (and most of it done indoors in cold weather) time of the year. It is also not beyond the realms of reason to question whether having a 6 week lockdown prior to December actually fuelled people’s desire to make the most of what everyone presumed would be a small window of freedom.

But the government seems too caught up in the almost zero-risk tolerance assumption that the nature of how people behave during Christmas would directly translate to this time of year too. Every time the risk tolerance goes up though, people pretend to be surprised by cases rising, the media goes mad, lockdown is employed again — and then lockdown is invariably hailed as the saviour. So reopening measures are applied and are never really given a chance to develop.

CIARAN_BOYLE wrote: »

Its not like Nphet didn't advise increasing restrictions previously.

The Thursday recommendation that you call happy to remain at level 3 was more along the line of

Given that we have already reccommended raised restrictions and you have rejected our advice we don't see sufficient new evidence that additional restrictions are needed that we would expect you to review your decision. Therefore we do not reccommend increased restrictions at this time.

Tony then came in on Sunday with the boys said increased restrictions weeks ago. You ignored them. They said the position hadn't changed on Thursday. Well Thursdays numbers were crap, Fridays numbers were crap and Saturdays numbers were crap. The situation has only gotten worse.

But what Tony didn't tell Stephen was that Level 5 was on the table and they blindsided the government with a letter that would be leaked without hesitation. They lost a lot of brownie points in some quarters over all of that and it led directly to the Cabinet COVID sub-committee.

ArthurDayne wrote: »

You call it rubbish but you then do precisely the very thing I touched on in my post — you move the debate to the question of whether the travel restrictions are justified or not. I specifically said that this was not the point being contested, I was contesting your attempts to dress up the travel restrictions as being not that bad despite the fact that they are an unprecedented level of restriction on the ability of Irish people to move freely in their own country.

So I would remind you that in the course of this conversation you’ve gone from saying that the restrictions are not a travel restriction at all (which is completely wrong) to now moving the goalposts to a different debate and calling my post rubbish.

You said in an earlier post that you were tired of ‘endless rubbish’ on this thread. But if you want high-quality discussion, you have to build it on an a foundation of good faith. What is the point in trying to debate with someone on the proportionality and justifiability of the travel restrictions if they are trying to argue that they are hardly restrictions at all?

You might check -there was no movement
of the discussion simply a statement of fact about what the 5km restriction entails. It was your comment that was involved in some quite spectacular goalpost relocation maneuvers. Up to and including bringing in the British army (that was the 'rubbish' bit I referred to btw) and positing that a temporary 5km restriction being - according to your argument a "fundamental undermining of constitutional rights".


You can check if you like but I never discussed 'justifiable' - you did when you speculated on my opinions on that issue

ArthurDayne wrote:

You might believe that this infringement is justifiable or proportionate or whatever 

If your looking for that type of discussion you're in the wrong forum imho. Thanks all the same.