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

Friend in Berlin was telling me her daughter age 7 has to wear a mask all day in school and parents have to do three antigen tests on the child every week .

People keep assuming waves of covid start, peak and finish at the same time through the world. It doesn't. As you can clearly see, Ireland's peaks have been different.

It seems to go Ireland peaks, then Bulgaria, then Romania and then Ukraine. I don't see why this will change all of a sudden.

This can be seen when you look at Europe as a whole, the west seem to peak first followed later by eastern Europe.

It's easy to see why the west seems interconnected, lots of travel between Ireland/UK/Spain/Portugal/France, I assume there's a similar pattern all over Europe with groups of countries all interconnected.

What the point of getting tested anymore? Covid is endemic now. Are you getting tested every time to find out what type of flu you have?

@convolved wrote:

I've flown Poland <-> Ireland recently. Despite being officially required under threat of large fines or even jail time, border control on ether side never asked for any documentation, both going in and out. Landing in Dublin I've passed via the automatic gates, and Polish border guards literally told me to "bin it all" when asked if they need to see the paperwork.

Same as that, family and I have flown out of Ireland and onwards from Denmark, and at no stage did we need to actually produce negative pcr tests. Just verbal confirmations

I was in the barbers recently and saw they were wiping everything down in between customers, nice to see the place being kept so clean but a waste of time when dealing with an airborne virus.

Similar number of tests today as last Monday, 200 less positive cases. Very weird to say it, but 1,368 positive swabs today is the lowest swab count since 4th August.

There were some faint signs last week that cases might be starting to drop back down again ever so slowly. Be interesting to see how this week goes.

The penny hasn't dropped with a lot of people yet that it is airborne and that is the main means of spreading.

According to the CDC there's 1 in 30,000 risk of surface transmission, and yet like most behaviours with no scientific basis, we persist with endless sanitising of hands and surfaces.

Went for my first Covid test today with my little fella. We were staying with family in the UK for the past week, and developed coughs last Wednesday. We could have got tested in the UK but as we were staying with family there was no way we could have effectively isolated with them - plus spending an extra two weeks there would have vastly increased the chances that we would have infected them. So we took the executive decision to travel home yesterday (the day we had planned to travel) and get tested here instead.

I probably wouldn't have bothered going for a test myself if it wasn't for the fact that I was bringing my son, given I'm fully vaccinated. And really the only reason I was bringing him for a test is that his creche won't take him with a cough and without a negative test, which is understandable. I tell you what though, I won't be rushing back to be tested. The nasal swab was really horrible, painful too. Give me a needle injection any day over the that. I'll have to have more than just a mild cough in order to get me anywhere back near that nasal swab.

What I can't understand is how they manage to get any viral material from the tiny swab they do of kids noses compared to the finger length swab they put up an adult's nose.