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

Good to know .But my friend UK was never actually in hospital .It was based simply on a positive PCR

They have mapped over 5m genomes and a very miniscule number even become a VUI, out of which a smaller subset become VOCs. Vaccination worldwide should mitigate the risk of a more virulent form.

What about other industries? I get your predicament but no need to keep saying you're a teacher! No emergency services personnel are banging on as much as teachers or any other industry to be honest.

23 total cases and 2 admissions, one child and one adult from week 50 of 2021. That’s the last known report.

You claim they don't work as fact, when obviously they do.

And don't think of it as burning down a house, think of it as a controlled burn where the max burn rate is your health capacity.

Then things start making sense.

Masks and certs are the simplest least impactful way to keep numbers down, they'll be the last to go (after full return to Offices has occurred).

And again, you were saying the same thing before vaccines existed (which have reduced the death rate substantially and allowed many who would have died with COVID in 2020 to come through it instead) so it all comes across as disingenuous at this point.

And again, one other bit being missed is that the economic performance of Ireland Inc. is very strong right now, much stronger than other economies around us, this lets us be more cautious in reopening (again, I don't agree we should wait much longer) as the impact on the budget/taxes/jobs has been lower than other countries.

As one of the UK scientists observed viruses can lose fitness to compete, with its mutations. Any new variant would have to beat down Omicron and in the face of increasing vaccination levels worldwide that is a pretty tall order.

Some vaccine companies have already committed themselves to being able to produce a tweaked version in 100 days. Add in antivirals, 2 so far and more to come, monoclonal antibody treatments and ongoing research on things like nanobodies, we are not really back at square one.

Are the Uk rags now running out of Covid news? 😆

40 discharges on a weekend is really good, historically.

118 admissions is also quite a good bit lower than the 150+ we were doing after Xmas.

These numbers are really making me optimistic. If numbers only go up by a net ~60/day over the weekend, we'll come in under 850 on Tuesday.

One would like to think that 17k cases today is also something good, but it's meaningless without the swab numbers. We're also in a period of recalibration, so numbers as low as 15k or as high as 30k shouldn't be a surprise over the next 3-4 days.

One uptick is that the latency for new treatments and vaccines will be much lower, for the next 10 years at least (then we give out about the cost of maintaining that infrastructure and close it all down).

And yes, a new variant could change things again (and we can react much faster now), but this can happen with all virus, the spike protein, even with Omicron, remains an effective attack vector for vaccines (almost like the scientists knew what they were doing) if we're going to worry about future variants we may as well worry about super-flu/ebola/AIDS as well.

Sorry, added the bit about Denmark after you read/quoted, they also have the advantage that they don't share a land border with the worst performer in Europe (along with a better organised health system).

you are not fully vaccinated until you've had a third shot due to the current variant, omicron, rapidly outcompeting all other variants and two shots not being very effective against it. how do you not know that? i'm not being smart but do you read up on what's going on at all?

Oh yikes. Hopefully I somehow manage to escape that!