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

Benimar wrote: »

There are some people who still don’t understand (or pretend to not understand?) how deaths are reported.

12 months in and people still claiming conspiracies because they don't understand the basics

Pandemics are the new IQ test

A recent tweet from Bressie to his quarter of a million followers

The briefings are now resembling a Black Comedy film and they need to start saying things like "When the Schools close this Summer, we'll use the spare R0 for new things. Outdoor restaurants can come back etc"

If you keep beating people up with Gloom Porn they will start making their own restriction rules

Many already are

https://twitter.com/nbrez/status/1372870931954208769

Vaccine passports will unlock indoor gatherings

I love how anti-vaxxers are getting locked out of things like concerts and travel

It'll make both more enjoyable and full of decent people

The rules are undoubtedly too blunt an instrument and most definitely a bit too arbitrary and could be fine tuned a lot more. However, we have also very recently gone from relatively low rates to being briefly the worst in the world per capita for a few weeks to now back to fairly reasonable again.

It just shows how insanely volatile the situation is and how rapidly this damn thing can ramp up and down.

There's no way of describing this disease as anything other than an absolute nightmare scenario and there's nothing other than 'least worst' options, at least until the vaccines are rolled out to a level where by we get to herd immunity and that's showing evidence of potentially being around the corner as the months roll on.

The situation is grim, but the messaging also needs to be presenting some practical solutions to give people some hope too.

I don't think it's being helped much by the comparatively slower rollout of the vaccines, relative to the UK and US, which are our biggest comparators as anglophones. Even if we're are doing well by EU & EEA standards and are significantly ahead of Canada, Japan etc etc and much of the world, that's not registering here. All that matters is we are behind the UK.

We're also being bombarded with very aggressively anti-EU messaging from an element of the UK media and politics. Some of it is bordering on trolling and even propaganda and that's being heavily absorbed here and translated into the usual Irish self-loathing "only in Ireland --- we're the thurd wurolde' and so on.

I think the government, NPHET and also elements of the Irish media need to be more aware of Ireland's mental state and cultural biases sometimes.

This is not the USA or the UK. We have not had a major issue with non-compliance with rules. I've actually find Ireland is going into lock-step on this and is often far more conservative than many places. There are outliers, but they're definitely not most.

However, if you keep bashing us over the head with heavy messaging, there's also the other side of Ireland's national psyche, which is quite prone to finding self-fulfilling and depressing narratives and applying them to a culture that does not really come across as all that confidently robust at times. As a culture, we spend a lot of time seeking approval and comparing against benchmarks. That can be very good in some ways, but it can be very depressing if we're perceiving ourselves to be performing far worse than we actually are.

It's being made worse by a lack of strong leadership. I don't mean authoritarian leadership, but we are lacking someone who can really put forward the positives and bring the country along with them. There's a sense of everyone, including the government, being quite frightened by what's going on and that's not a good place to be.