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

Good news from SA today. They're now post-peak, the infection having gone from basically nothing to peak in 4 weeks. Which is about twice as fast as other variants.

Doesn't tell us what case numbers to be expect, but could easily be an average of 10-15k with a day or two of completely insane numbers. most likely early in the New Year for us, if not sooner.

Arguments over case backlogs are fairly academic at this stage. 7k is going to look normal, if it not small, very shortly.

Yes. I think we should peak fairly soon, probably early January.

I’m actually not judging them negatively at all. wouldn’t mind a pint myself

But It’s a fact that omicron spreads like wildfire and pubs are probably rife with it right now.

I’d be hopeful of this too. But January is going to be chaos for a few weeks.

You'd think that, and that would be the sensible thing to do. But Nphet and the media are fixated on "de numbers". So if they are high we'll still have restrictions, regardless of the hospital numbers.

The government need to step up and open back up quickly, as soon as it becomes apparent that large cases don't mean large hospital numbers (hopefully). But they won't, I can't see them doing that.

They will have the advantage of sa, uk etc being ahead of us, i think they are seeing that the cure can be worse than the disease, they are wary of what happened last January though

At no point since this began have we looked elsewhere and seen that the cure is worse than the disease e.g. no full rollback of restrictions last summer.

These further restrictions are in and the majority can begrudgingly accept them, the memory of last year helps with that. What shouldn’t be accepted is if come 11th January the high case numbers have not resulted in the hospitals being overwhelmed and they decide to not remove them. In that case, hopefully we see widespread protests so big the usual loons cannot claim them or take them over.

Ireland will still be under severe restrictions come April.

And as sure as night follows day, you will be justifying those restrictions under the basis we won't reopen until such a point as we won't need to roll back, just as you did back in September while we awaited Irelands reopening day.

Its already been said, but if we have the expected surge of cases in January then socialisation will remain restricted until April/May.

We all know it is stupid, but that is what happened before and it is what will happen again.

Those people who last summer twisted themselves in knots trying to justify the extended restrictions really should have learned something from that.

You know thats not going to happen though when it comes to reopening?

In June whilst the rest of Europe opened up, full stadiums enjoying euro football, people allowed eat and drink indoors, festivals, nightclubs etc etc we were told "the greatest hurricane this country has ever seen" in terms of COVID was coming. We opened on October 22nd!! For 3 weeks! There was no hurricane not because we were restricted because there wasnt in every other country that wasnt restricted.

The same thing will happen, you know it, i know it, we all know it.

Every country in Europe has a plan to live with COVID that actually means living with it when possible, we dont, and we just accept it. Oh and the same posters will defend it, over and over and over again!

The full report is here, particularly notice the peaks and troughs follow the lockdowns/re-openings quite closely in 2020 and early 2021, also that the CSO is purposely going from March to February with the reports almost in anticipation of people trying to misuse the data:

Measuring Mortality Using Public Data Sources 2019-2021 - CSO - Central Statistics Office

You'd think this empirical data would be enough to put to bed the "lockdowns and restrictions don't work at all" and "there was no excess deaths" crowd, but it won't be.

What will be worse this year though is other countries have learned to adapt and move more quickly now, we will simply be left behind comedians/plays/band tours will go ahead but just cancel the Irish leg where up to now the tour was cancelled.

Films will be released in the cinemas abroad they might give us the option to stream but I doubt it with how easy it is to pirate so we just wait longer on the stream release.

Those are the only 2 examples I could think at the minute as I've to take a day off work to see the new Spiderman and Matrix films and have to go see a comedian at noon on the 27th now instead of 8pm, before people try to say its not all about gigs and cinemas.

We will do it the way we have always done it.

It's the simplest thing in the world

2020 deaths = 31,765

2019 deaths = 31,134

2018 deaths = 31,140

2017 deaths = 30,418

Black and white. An annual summary.