Covid 19 Part XXXIV-249,437 ROI(4,906 deaths) 120,195 NI (2,145 deaths)(01/05)Read OP

eeepaulo wrote: »

No that's wrong as well covid deaths as a percentage of population is about 1/1000 or 0.1%

How did you calculate that?

LillyIsland wrote: »

How did you calculate that?

I think you just divided 4.9m into 4800.

Klonker wrote: »

Its been a little funny the last few weeks hearing NIAC, NPHET and the Government relaying how little risk covid is to under 30s in particular. First it was to justify the change in the vaccine rollout plan to go more so by age rather than occupation and now we are hearing it again in terms of the risk of covid versus the risk of a cloth from the vaccine. Where were these comments for the last 13 months? We were being led to believe that young people with no underlying conditions were filling up hospitals, ICUs and dying and then we here Karina Butler of NIAC stat on a number of radio stations yesterday that about 90% of under 30s get no symptoms, never mind severe covid.

Look, its good that they are telling us the truth at the moment about these things but it's funny the way we only hear about them when it suits the speakers narrative.

Good points above.

GooglePlus wrote: »

What do you suggest, we impose restrictions on everyone until we reach sufficient vaccination levels to allow a full opening? So tell those who are no longer at risk to remain under full restriction, even when it would be completely safe for them to go on holiday (many countries opening up to vaccinated tourism). You can't have your pie until I get mine?

Firstly, nothing is completely safe. Secondly I propose that we don't use vaccinations as a metric for opening up. Certainly not to the same extent that the government have been relying on to date. We are putting everything on hold to wait until healthy people are vaccinated.
We are a minimum of 3 months from a 40 year being fully vaccinated, and with developments over the last few days that could be 6 months away or more.

For reference, the typical yearly death count in Ireland is about 30,000.

Which means about 1 in 6 deaths over the last 12 months are Covid deaths.

We won't get a full picture for a while tbh. It's not 30,000 deaths, with 4800 Covid deaths on top of it. Many of those who died are in the cohorts most likely to have died anyway. And the nature of a lockdown means that the typical death profile for the year will have been altered anyway. So there's a good chance we'll see no excess deaths this year, but that doesn't mean we overcooked our response. 4,800 deaths is a big number and we know from other western countries that it could easily have been double that if our response had been less restrictive.

Klonker wrote: »

I guess what I'm trying to say is why can't they be completely honest with us at all times and not just when it suits the narrative they want at that particular time.

I agree completely with your post, and I have raged many times over the last 12 months with RTE and NPHET wheeling out severely injured younger people and publishing stats on infections in schools.
I do understand why, though I'm conflicted on it. The concern would be that if you say, "Look, if you're under 50 you statistically don't need to worry about this", there's a good chance younger people will throw caution to the wind. This will result in widespread infection, which will unavoidably impact the most vulnerable cohorts. And will, ultimately, result in excess deaths in younger age groups.

No, people as a group cannot be trusted to use their best judgement. Simply presenting the information honestly and asking people to do the right thing, will fall flat on its face. Everyone's "best judgement" has a curious bias towards those things which present the least inconvenience to the individual.

This is not an Irish thing, it's a human thing.

My gut feeling though is that there was always a need for more honesty with clearer and stronger enforcement. We already know that "shock" advertising doesn't work on younger people. Yet they persisted on giving it a go anyway.

I am glad to hear it going the other way though. We can't stay at this level of restriction if the majority of over 60s are vaccinated, so the plan to lift restrictions needs to only be balanced against the vaccination programme and not absolutely dependent on it.

is_that_so wrote: »

No, there's a 4th surge coming, maybe, probably, I think!

And a fifth!!! at least there is if you listen to that ridiculous idiot Tomas Ryan.

Faugheen wrote: »

In fairness Philip Nolan has introduced modelling that would show the impact of higher vaccination numbers on the R-number.

He said that if there were a certain number of cases (can’t remember how many) with theoretical r-number of 1.4 without vaccines, then that same number drops substantially as more people are vaccinated even if the same number of cases are showing up. That’s why NPHET keeps saying that fully vaccinated numbers are too low right now.

Philip Nolans models can't come up with a better range for R than 0.6 - 1.0 which is totally meaningless, he's either saying case numbers are falling quickly or they are static so you might as well read the tea leaves or get out the old Ouija board.

Need to be careful here. The risk NIAC are talking about to under 30s is very different to the risk of covid for that cohort without any vaccination programme. They're not communicating it well. But I have some sympathy there it's a fcking hard thing to communicate.

NIAC are assuming that going forward only a small proportion of under 30s will get covid thanks to restrictions and everyone around them being vaccinated. Whereas we have to vaccinate all of them. Even if the risk of vaccination is lower than covid if enough people under 30 were never going to get covid and everyone under 30 is a given a vaccine you could end up with more people under 30 in ICU from the vaccine than the virus. The level of disease incidence in the population group determines the trade off.

If there were no vaccine the risk to folks under 30 is markedly different. Substantially so.

Also the crude analysis done by MHRA and NIAC does not take into account underlying health conditions, general hospitalisations, long covid etc. It doesn't need to but again I think they need to communicate that. I also disagree with their exclusion of risk medical conditions. The risk benefits massively favours the vaccines for those cohorts. Currently our disease incidence is low but that requires the level of social contacts to be broadly maintained. I cannot see that holding as we open up. If the disease incidence rises then the risk profile changes. Especially for the more vulnerable cohorts. They need vaccines sooner rather than later.

Turtwig wrote: »

Need to be careful here. The risk NIAC are talking about to under 30s is very different to the risk of covid for that cohort without any vaccination programme. They're not communicating it well. But I have some sympathy there it's a fcking hard thing to communicate.

The stats they were using though weren't the probability of catching covid and then your chances of dying. It was just your chances of dying if you get covid. So let's not get that confused as that what it seems you think they are comparing when using those stats. I listened to Karina Butler on every radio interview she did yesterday.

They did make their decision though on based on chances of getting covid and chances of ending up in ICU and/or dying. In fairness its impossible for them to give stats to back up this moving target as case figures increase/decrease over time. Its really a judgement call and they went ultra conservative as they'd say themselves.

Sweet.Science wrote: »

Wow . Cases really not translating into hospitalisations like before

I wanted to dig into this a bit more using data sourced from OurWorldInData (I tried EU data sources but they're a mess).

Here's a chart showing cases, hospitalisations and ICU admissions over Ireland's pandemic.

I adjusted the stats to align for late November/early December 2020, which was the last time we had a steady state situation, before The Christmas Thing happened. I shall call this period "Autumn 2020".

Comparing the latest stats to that period, you can see that:

- The "ICU rate" (ICU admissions relative to cases) is now at about 2/3 of what it was in Autumn 2020.
- The "hospital admission rate" (hosp. admissions relative to cases) is now at about 1/4 of what it was in Autumn 2020.

This is obviously good news, but a little surprising to me. I had expected that ICU admissions would be depressed more than hospital admissions by vaccinations.

But then I remembered that hospital admissions is something like "the flow of people in hospital with COVID", which used to include a lot of people who picked up COVID whilst in hospital for other things, and so the reduction in that statistic is likely due to vaccination of healthcare workers making hospitals a less infectious place.