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

Ditch masks in schools? Absolutely. You can find my posts against them when they were brought in in a panic, 19 months into a pandemic. We didn’t need them for the first year and a half of schools during Covid, we didn’t need them in a rushed panic.

Where did I say ditch ventilation? Again, you can find my posts here yesterday calling for a common sense approach. If a classroom is freezing, close some windows. If not, have them open.

But what is the point of measures to still slow the spread when it is ripping regardless, in and out of school. It’s deluding ourselves that we are ‘staying safe’ by forcing kids to wear masks and just dragging out the inevitable spread of omicron. It will spread. We are just pushing a problem down the road.

If you want masks forever and to wear them, fire away. Windows open always, fire away. But don’t force everyone to run with this in the name of ‘staying safe’.

I had a read back through some of her tweets. I can understand her hysteria. It seems to me that she is speaking from her own situation. Olive mentioned having children who are high risk and one became quite unwell after contracting Covid. I have sympathy for her as she is no doubt terrified.

However given her platform if I were her I'd take a step back. It's all emotion, fear, panic. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of common sense or understanding of scientific evidence. It's very much 'I'm frightened for my family so all of you should be too'.

Also she is full of blame and anger towards the Government. I'm familiar myself with that kind of thinking but it's usually because we feel powerless and are lashing out.

I'd just add, one thing I have never ever understood about the way we are surveying how well countries are performing is that there has been no attempt to come up with a standardised, random, representative sampling mythology.

I would expect something like this:

• Ring fence maybe 5% of the testing capacity.
• Volunteer households / individuals
• Representative of different types of household, geographical locations, housing types, work types, commute / travel types, age profiles etc.
• Test weekly or maybe twice weekly
• An additional totally random sample just based on geography e.g. setup booths in shopping centres / outside supermarkets and ask people to just give an anonymous swab.

If every country in the EU or ECDC area did that we could compare like-for-like and get a true picture of scale of spread. Because as it stands we are getting all sorts of selection and self-selection biases, e.g. people who are going because they've a positive antigen tests or symptoms. It would be quite surprising if that didn't turn out a high positivity rate as they're quite obviously highly likely to be positive.

You're also seeing totally different testing mythologies and capacities being used in different countries and comparisons that just don't make sense. Country X has 20,000 per day and country Y has 5000 a day, yet we don't examine anything about how the testing works or what the scale of testing is or anything really. You're also still getting raw number comparisons without any references to population, both in terms of international comparisons and even county-by-county here.