Relaxation of Restrictions, Part XII *Read OP For Mod Warnings*

And just to include the authors conclusion on that:

We reopened 3 months later than England, anywhere from 1-3 months behind the rest of the EU, because we were promised that as a result of having the slowest reopening on the continent we definitely wouldn't have to lockdown again. We were just being extra safe you see.

3 weeks after reopening we've gone back into restrictions, with even more lockdown measure being hinted at coming soon by our leadership already. While England is still completely open, more open than we've been at any point in 2021.

The Irish media and politicians were extremely quick last July to call Boris Johnson callous, reckless and careless with his plan to reopen in summer when hospitals aren't under strain, in order to build natural immunity for winter. But it worked. Yet there are no stories in the media now admitting he was proven completely right, while our staying locked down in August and September has just resulted us being in a much, much worse situation in regards to hospital capacity now leading up to Christmas.

The question is why aren't our media and opposition political parties doing their job and calling out the government on this disastrous policy choice? Why have they been so quiet throughout the entire covid crisis, very rarely questioning any government policy?

When people stop complying with non sensical government mandates.

Don’t go to England! You’ll have a heart attack!

Right. The reason they can't say there's statistical evidence of a decline is because the confidence intervals overlap between successive measurements, to my reading. It's possible with a larger sample size there'd continue be no statistical evidence of waning re: C19. It's also possible that there's some non-normal characteristics of those who are affected by waning and confidence intervals will remain large. Hard to say, but either way, there's weak evidence that it isn't just rates of infection that are affected by waning. Similar findings in Israel, with correlations to age.

Holohan back on the airwaves trying to fear-monger about how we need to avoid 200k people getting Covid in December.

What a fcking clown that man is! - I really hope all the under 40's ignore him and go out and socialize this Christmas. Natural immunity is the only way we are getting out of this rinse and repeat lockdown nonsense and this guy is actively trying to prevent that from happening.

Holohan and the coward politicians who listen to him have wrecked this country for a generation the debt we have been loaded with will hold us back for decades.

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So, as guessed, your answer is just to ignore the virus and not make any hard decisions.

If you want to follow the UK, you need to decide which people not to treat, but you'll run away from that as well because you will be exposed as a charlatan and fraud.

That’s just simply not the case.

"who is lapping up restrictions?".

"what I am prepared to do is what I am told".

You answered your own question there!

What did we do all the other years that hospitals were full? Not a dig by the way.

You seem to have major problems understanding simple concepts.

Like "possibility": saying you didn't know something was possible is completely different to saying you didn't know details about it.

Or "unsourced": I included numerous links to sources, yet you bizarrely call that "unsourced"? That's why I gave up including links in the first place. People like you just blather on, ignore facts, move goalposts, or just make up lies like the cretins you defend.

You, on the other hand, haven't provided any links whatsoever to back up anything you've said. You've given me the title of a completely irrelevant ECDC report listing different categories of variants as of last week. There's nothing whatsoever there indicating that the ECDC had no idea for most of 2021 that variants were possible. I'd be very surprised if any such source existed, given you yourself were the one who pointed out that everyone should know we get different strains of flu every year. So I'm fairly sure the ECDC have heard of the concept.

I've no idea what your first paragraph means, it doesn't seem to make sense. If you're asking for a government who had a plan in summer 2020 which was based on as-yet unidentified variants and the impact of vaccines which hadn't been developed, then no - I doubt any exists unless someone has a time machine. And if they did that would be better used to go back pre-Covid and stop it happening.

I am however aware of a government that released a complete shambles of a "plan" in mid-September 2020. A plan that was obsolete on the day it was launched. A plan the Taoiseach lied about key elements of even as he launched it. And that later the Tanaiste later claimed failed because they were unaware of the impact of vaccines (which could only have helped it succeed) or of the POSSIBILITY of covid variants.

I'm not making any claim here. I'm just referencing the statement Varadkar made. Either he told the truth and the government and their advisers are astonishingly incompetent and were actually not aware that it was possible that variants of a virus might exist. Or he lied, and used that as an excuse to try to pass off responsibility for their disaster of a plan.

Still dodging the question, the HSE doesn't have infinite capacity, we could throw all our taxes at it but it has a limit. COVID puts a massive strain on the HSE, when making decisions around restrictions there has to be a plan to either avoid the capacity limit or what to do with patients when it is hit.

The answer from other years is to put people on trolleys in the corridors, this isn't possible due to the infectious nature of COVID, so you either stay within capacity or turn people away.

The rhetoric of "it's not my job to protect the HSE" is bullsh*t, the governments job IS to protect the HSE, if you were in government, what do you do to protect it.

"Oh lots of people died but it's not my job to protect you" isn't a coherent or rational answer.

People were put on trolleys and treated in hallways, this isn't really an option for an infectious virus like SARS-COV2. Capacity has been expanded but it wouldn't be enough if the case trajectory kept going it's current direction. However, the upside is everybody is getting boosted, already vaccinated or getting infected (which isn't an upside for the individual or hospitals) but does get us to the point where ncov2019 is just cov2019 and normality can resume (as is pretty much the case in the UK).