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

I'm not being argumentative, I'm genuinely curious here, when you say living with COVID, do you mean ignoring COVID or accepting that some things about how we live our lives will be a bit different than they were before ? Like adapting our lives to live with COVID until it becomes endemic in the background.

The plan was vaccines, nobody knew quite how effective or not they would be in real life. I don't know what the plan is now. Presumably they're hoping with the apparently much increased protection from boosters, the plan is now a 3 dose vaccine regimen. Who knows.

Well they do, and it would be great if they did it more and better therapeutics are becoming available soon. But what's your plan from this point forward? We should have opened sooner, but didn't, 5th December, hospitals near capacity and a more infectious variant coming (that may be milder but unknown right now, also may decrease vaccine efficacy), what's the next step? If it's open up, what do we do with those needing hospital care, if it's more restrictions, on what and why. If it's "everyone should be healthier", great, we should, it will take years to make a dent in it, what till then?

The way I see it is that we're over half way down a tunnel and can't really go back so need to press forward keeping the hospitalisations under control till it should start alleviating itself in Spring then fully open. England is going full bore with boosters and bringing back masks, that should be an indication to everybody, Boris will not have liked to bring back the mask mandates and England has a higher tolerance than other countries for letting people die.

What nonsense is this - test a quarter of the population every week:

whatever about the practical issues with this, what purpose does it serve? Isolate if you have symptoms, and give out 3rd doses at rapid pace. Testing is pretty pointless at this stage in the pandemic.

Some vaccines give a sterilising immunity, it's still not 100%, but close to it, antibodies in the blood attack the virus quickly before it has a chance to multiply and pass on to others (but you stick your finger in someone's nose, you can still get it), the COVID vaccines have a high antibody count soon after receiving a dose (like much much higher than needed), but this drops off over months (seems to be an evolutionary quirk in our immune system to coronavirus such as colds) which means the virus can get in and multiply and then pass on, protection against severe disease is still there (for most) and doesn't wane anywhere near as much as the ability to stop transmission. It's thought this is because the vaccines aren't specifically targeting the respiratory system so the virus can build up there before the immune system sees the virus and starts attacking it by which time it has a foothold already. Nasal vaccines may help this (but at the disadvantage of not offering as good protection against severe disease) and would likely be targeted at those less vulnerable to the effects of COVID.

It's probably best to judge the effectiveness of the vaccine based on actual data rather than a couple of anecdotes. The data on vaccine effectiveness against serious illness is absolutely clear - vaccines work very well. It's a pity they don't stop transmission quite as well as we hoped, but without vaccines we would now be in the most severe lockdown we've ever had because delta is so transmissible.

The booster programme is in 2nd gear when it should be in 5th gear. Excuses that people were not yet at 5 months. My parents were up to 7 months and are mid 70’s.

I am late 40’s and should be offered it next week but the chances of that happening are next to none - perhaps in 6 weeks time the way it is going.

While Paul Reid and Tony H and the NPHET crowd are wagging their fingers at us, the slow pace of boosters is down to them. It is not a supply issue.

Yes, I suppose that is kind of what I am saying. And that

It probably is far fetched. I don't come here claiming to know the answer to everything.

I'm sure adults are picking it up from their adult social interaction.

But all I can tell you is that in my job (second level teaching) we have gone from 2-3 members of staff being absent to almost 20 each day, now that the close contact rule has been brought in. Which, to me, at second level makes no sense as we are masked. But you see, if the rule has to be in place for one, it has to be there for all and I'll be the first to admit that if second level teachers were made exempt from that rule, there would be war (I'd be happy to be exempt)

All I was suggesting is that the possible train of thought from government (yeah yeah, I know, 'they don't have a train of thought) is that if they can mask the older of primary school children they can go back to not needing the isolate rule.

Is this the right and most effective way to go about doing so? No. Is it the cheapest? Yes.

I think labelling it as "rewarded with freedom" and "punished with restrictions" is a bit weird, the adult population aren't children, we should understand what's needed and why it's needed to combat a novel virus that disproportionality effects those with weak immune systems and are older from dying off in droves without feeling the need to be rewarded for it.

Meme from reddit that kind of sums it up.

That report says 13% of all cases were not vaccinated in the four weeks to November 20th.

Can't comment on primary schools but in secondary, that was always how it was done (we were all masked from day one)

The change came for us when they did away with the 'close contacts isolate rule' and that is when principals stopped informing parents of positive cases at all.

My plan is to leave people die tbh. Lots wouldn't agree with it but this predominantly kills the very old and the very sick, so I don't see why 99% of people should have their lives curtailed to save lots of people who have either lived theirs or their survival outlook isn't very good even without covid around anyway.

Mitigate the hospital spread by having some dedicated covid only treatment centres, and vaccinations, antivirals etc are there for those people or anyone else who wants to, but outside that, let's just go back to normal imo.

So interesting times ahead chaps. Vaccines are still preventing death amongst that unchanged vulnerable cohort (i.e. 80+ year olds and and those with <insert your preferred quantifier here> underlying conditions). However the reasons for targeting the unvaccinated are not converging:

- Omicron ignores vaccination status

- Vaccines do not inhibit transmission (per Tony Holohan remember)

- The “unvaccinated are dominating hospital ICUs" story has disappeared without explanation (probably with some relief as they were never able to qualify this strange statistic)

- …

I’m feeling the need for a new Long-Covid-is-going-to-rip-through-the-younger-cohort type narrative. Over to you RTE’s Brendan O’Connor ;-) 

Speaking of which, both his mature lady agony aunts yesterday had a story to tell about how they were accommodating unvaccinated family member peers over Christmas. Will leave it as an exercise for the amateur mathematicians here to work out the probability of this scenario being true.