Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

The next variant should be called the WTF variant. Suits the situation we're in IMO

The graph is crazy when overlapped with a lag, huge increases in cases, minor increase in deaths

This vaccine passport stuff is a nonsense.

I know at least 10 people who are fully vaccinated that have got Covid in the last month, so could have had a 'vaccine passport' to get in places but still transmit Covid to other people.

This illustrates the impact well I think.

Anyone following this page on Twitter??

seems real… but obviously still have some doubts.

Good page for realistic stats on our hospitals

It's far too early to be jumping to conclusions about a plateau, we've had a couple of days of slightly lower than could have been expected cases given the recent trajectory, the significance of that won't be immediately apparent. It really is still early enough days.

I, personally, don't think it's anything more significant than the extremely good weather leading to people doing things almost exclusively outside and a proportion putting off going for tests because of the sunny weather.

It's a pause, we'll be back to growth soon enough again. I'd be very, very confident of that.

It would only be effective in conjunction with a fairly strict lockdown.

Our vaccine supply is mostly one of the two dose mRNA vaccines. Even ifyou could give everyone their first shot within a week it would be seven weeks before everyone is vaccinated. Allow for those who test positive during the vaccination schedule having to wait and there could be a long tail that extends the plan well beyond seven weeks.

@landofthetree wrote

If that's the case, then what's the goal here? Endless lockdowns? For what purpose?

I suppose the earth is flat aswell right?

If the UK numbers stay low then surely we will be back to full capacity sports events etc soon, I thought after the euros their numbers would get to the hundreds of thousands a day but they leveled off, so far opening up has been a success for them.

We will have to go to the UK to randomly walk into a cafe to have a cup of tea never mind a concert.

https://twitter.com/roinnslainte/status/1418602553764352010

As of midnight, Thursday 22nd July, we are reporting

1,386* confirmed cases of #COVID19.

22 in ICU. 106 in hospital.

*Daily case numbers may change due to future data review, validation and update

Hospital figures on the rise again?

What lockdown is this?

Essentially, Claire Byrne ran at least four live role play sketches complete with mock-up settings for pod-based pubs and hairdressers respectively, Electric Picnic style festivals with each person inside a giant plastic zorb-like hamster ball, and Christmas dinner with minimal physical contact or social mixing between branches of extended families. Each of these was presented as a neutral "this is how the scientists are saying we can live safely for the indefinite future" news report and a bit of craic - and I must emphasise that this was not in the context of living within pandemic restrictions, but that horrible, soul crushing concept of "the new normal" as if this is just it for the rest of our lives. The key issue here is that they were presented vaguely and neutrally as "best advice from some top scientists", not as packaged propaganda from a privately funded lobby group with absolutely no connection whatsoever to the government or any sort of official body.

This isn't the particularly dystopian aspect though. The dystopian aspect is that ISAG were at this time privately admitting to, and encouraging eachother to continue, intentionally hyping-up this horrific "new normal" with the express intention of causing the general public to lose their minds with fear and anxiety, drum up anger at the lack of an alternative, and ultimately cajole people into lobbying the government to adopt the ISAG-favoured "Zero COVID" approach. It was never about how they actually felt life would be after the pandemic, and it was never about public safety. It was literally, in black and white, about manipulating peoples' emotions to provoke a political response - quite literally, "let's show people a future so horrifically depressing that they get upset enough to demand a policy U-turn from the government in order to avoid it". An all stick and no carrot approach to social engineering, essentially.

Now we can debate the ethics of lobby groups engaging in this kind of sh!te all day long, everyone knows that propaganda is rife in Irish politics and indeed in worldwide politics generally. And we certainly don't have to look very far to see other examples of lobby groups who are given absolutely incredible amounts of air time in the media and have exceptional influence on government policy. But in this case, in my view, RTE crossed a line. Maybe it's not the first time they've crossed this line, but it's the first time we have written evidence pointing towards it - they literally colluded with a lobby group and gave them a direct platform from which to spew their propaganda, and they didn't clearly label these segments as having been written not by RTE's journalists, but by this private lobby group.

In effect, they gave ISAG the cover of the respectable, nationally trusted on a wide scale, semi-publicly funded broadcaster RTE. They took content written by a private lobby group and presented it as original in-house content, not disclosing to the public that these segments were privately produced propaganda and not merely the result of work by the journalists working for the program. They also, as I have previously mentioned, referred to ISAG as if it was some kind of official body as opposed to clearly stating that it is a private pressure group with a hifalutin name, just like Iona, and nothing more.

This, in my view, is a massive betrayal of public trust, of the people who pay RTE's license fee, and more generally of the sacrosanct principles of journalistic ethics, ethics which we should be demanding that our national broadcaster adhere to without even the slightest hint of any exceptions.

As I mentioned previously, it does beg the question - just how many other well-produced segments for RTE current affairs debates were dreamed up by the marketing departments of private lobby groups, and not the journalists for whom the public has a lot of respect, and would have been easily misled into thinking were the actual authors?

This kind of carry on simply cannot be tolerated. If it is, we may as well formally declare that public service broadcasting in Ireland is over, and consign RTE to the same category of agenda driven propaganda as the likes of Fox or CNN. Which would be an utterly depressing development in the history of this Republic, IMO.