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

And we are rapidly heading towards 90% of adults (in fact those over 16) having those 'papers' by being fully vaccinated, so it's rapidly becoming a rather moot point in the sense that it will have almost zero impact on businesses as it's something almost the entire population has.

Unless you're in the rather unfortunate situation of running a business that has a target audience of anti-vaxxers (maybe a MAGA hat themed Covfefe shop?), the impact on your footfall should be rather minimal.

This is not the US and you're not going to have half the population going around unvaccinated to make some daft political point.

It's almost like we have our own elected government and made our own decisions, suited to our own unique circumstances, culture, risk perception, priorities, lifestyles and socialising habits ...

It’s too cautious. Not saying that we can’t roll back if there is a new variant, but we need to ditch social distancing now. And open up fully. Ride the spike up and down like in the UK and then, subject to no new variants, we are done. That is what the vaccination programme was intended to achieve.

People will be hospitalised and some, mostly unvaccinated, will die. But this is the time to do it, while schools are out and it’s still the summer.

Im in the US right now but have to come back soon. Going to hang out in the UK, leading very much a ‘back to normal’ life, pending hearing what our risk averse Taoiseaich has to say at the end of the month.

Where did I say that things shouldn’t open?

My point was you don’t give people hard deadlines for something that’s completely outside of your control, unless you’re a pontificating spin doctor, which is, unfortunately, what’s in office in the U.K. at the moment and is in office in many US states.

Ireland is in a far, far better position in terms of vaccine uptake than many of the redder US states where there’s been huge politicising of it.

Also where masks and social distancing have been required, we’ve been pragmatic about it. We’ve never had an outdoor mask mandate and from what I can see of it, 99%+ of the population did what they needed to do without fussing and ranting. A very small, very noisy group went off on a rant, but that hasn’t been at all reflected in reality beyond online discussions.

Most things are opened back up and running and that’s only likely to increase as august rolls on and the vaccines bed in.

If you give a false sense of security about a situation like this it’s misleading. There isn’t certainty. We will know far better where we stand in about 6 to 8 weeks, as the population wide vaccination will be complete and active (remember a lot of people are still between dose 1 and 2 or just recently doses. It takes roughly 6 weeks from dose 1 (2 weeks from dose 2)for those mRNA vaccines to be effective.)

Getting cart before horse and politicising this stuff is pointless. Look at Florida: you’ve a governor who seems to want to tap his ruby red slippers and make it all go away by decree, meanwhile the hospitals are starting to see thousands of people arriving.

Yesterday Florida recorded 13,747 people in hospital related to Covid-19, with at least 2,753 in ICU! That is the equivalent of 502 people in ICU here. We currently have 31 i.e Florida has currently got a 16 times worse outcome.

I know a lot of that is likely contributed to poor vaccine uptake and so on, but it’s a culture of rushing head first into stuff with a blind fold on and fingers in your ears because you don’t want to accept an unpleasant reality.

Bashing your head against the wall over and over won’t make the wall go away. Nor will shouting political slogans at it. Analysing what the wall is made of, using tools and dismantling it in a careful way tends to work better.

We’ll be at 90% fairly soon. That was how many people had either been vaccinated (at least partially) or had registered.

I’m assuming we will end up with between 90 and 95% uptake fairly soon.

We are roughly 3 to 4 weeks from that being complete.

The certs will likely become an irrelevance very quickly domestically, as the uptake is so high. It’s not France, Germany or the USA where, there’s a high degree of vaccine scepticism to deal with.

What we probably do need though is to ensure anyone entering the country, with a COVID cert is vaccinated - same as what Malta is doing etc and actually ensure that it enforced.

If the U.K. would do similar and consistently so, and we could create a vaccinated two island travel bubble within the Common Travel Area, it would be enormously helpful to both jurisdictions, which have very high vaccine rates.