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

"I live beside an industrial waste processing plant that sometimes releases up to 100,000 litres of contaminated water into the local river, where I get my drinking water from. I have set up every filtration mechanism I can get my hands on, yet on these days the quality of my water drops massively. You don't think the two could be linked, do you?"

Scale matters, Adam. The UK has 14 times the amount of people that we do and we share a completely uncontrolled border. When they flood us with sh1te, we can't put up flood defences, we can only wear waterproof gear and hope that we're not badly affected.

The UK has been an absolute sh1tshow throughout this pandemic, and by circumstance we've been dragged along by them. It's not lazy to blame the UK, it's fact. They have one of the worst infections and deaths records on the planet, a direct result of the "let the bodies pile high" Tory attitude. So by consequence, we are exposed to that. Politically, the government are unwilling to point fingers and cause conflict, but the dogs on the street know that this is why our case rates have been so consistently high despite our strong restrictions.

Our strong restrictions are the only thing that have protected us in any way from the Tory sh1tshow.

Until vaccination that is. Now cases are still on the rise in the UK and finally we're seeing ours come down. Because our vax rates are that much higher than theirs.

@timmyntc wrote:

The vaccination rollout has stalled in a number of areas well short of potential, and some of those areas are suffering particularly large numbers of cases.

It's difficult to seperate the factors (vaccine hesitancy, promixity to the UK where restrictions are lower, ignoring social distancing/mask wearing etc), so I don't know how you can be so confident that the one correlated factor (low vaccine take up) isn't responsible.

Most cases are in young people, young people have lower vaccine coverage. If we care about cases (I'm not sure I do, particularly, but public health seem to) it seems sensible to try to raise vaccine coverage in a group that where there's most transmission.

There is no other country in Europe that has a border like ours. You can't even call it a "soft" border. Ireland is for all intents and purposes a single jurisdiction when it comes to movement of people. We are not an island separated by a border. Ian Paisley Sr. even said it himself; "Our people are British but our cattle are Irish". When foot & mouth was around, we instituted border controls between the island of Ireland and the island of Britain. Because everyone knew that was the only way to control infection.

This time around, Northern Ireland refused to institute border controls between Ireland and Britain, thereby meaning that there was no border of any kind between the two jurisidictions.

This is in contrast to the rest of Europe (and almost the rest of the world) where formal, controllable borders exist between jurisdictions. German police can stand at the border and turn people around. Gardai & PSNI can't.

For the love of god don’t tell this woman that testing will hopefully be scaled back!!! She’ll have a banger!!

We got 90% of the adult population vaccinated in the last 6-7 months so I don’t think it was a waste at all actually

It's just reaching the point where anyone with even a hint of a symptom is showing up because it's free. The kids thing of the last week or so is the signal that we need to reel it in substantially.

Yep, poor innocent souls just having a takeaway pint, if the government had provided heating, they wouldn't have had to set the bins on fire, if they'd pedestrianized south William St, they wouldn't have walked on top of those cars, and if they had a recycling scheme, they wouldn't have tried to bounce that bottle off the waiters head.....

Yep, it was the public order unit who were the disgrace........

Or do you mean to stop yobs throwing bottles at bar men etc ?

They are more just like clowns now. Pat Kenny loves these people

You seem to have more of a beef with what was closed, vaccination until June was a supply issue, when it really ramped up impressively and antigen tests were less than useless for a long time. Even in the likes of Denmark where they have been extensively used they are just out of all of this.

Finally, I doubt your younger self had any foresight on the real culprit in this, the Delta variant and its Kent forerunner. They have scuppered all plans. There are undeniably things that we got wrong but would they really have made a massive difference as you seem to claim, with an ongoing global pandemic? Probably not.

I think there are a lot of things we can look back on say they were overzealous. Locking down for such prolonged periods of time being my number one issue with how we tackled this entire thing. Closing schools for the length of time is another major problem and one which when looked upon with the advice given since makes it all the more problematic.

I can't speak for anyone else but the lockdown from Christmas to April was bloody tough and should have been ended long before they actually did lift restrictions.

We used the sledgehammer to crack a nut approach under the guise of an abundance of caution and that can't be allowed happen again.

I wouldn't argue with some of that but Christmas really did knock us very badly sideways. There is plenty to learn from what we did, both good and bad but once we were in the worst phases of this caution was the only choice. I think there are some parts that should have been prioritised - education and construction being the main ones. The positive is that COVID-19 is no longer novel and we can pull out what was best of our performance to deal with anything similar.