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

Quite right.

The hypocrisy is one thing and is of course is what the media like to focus on for their gotcha moments. What gets to me is they clearly didn’t believe covid was anywhere near as dangerous as they were pretending. It wasn’t just the tories of course- it happened in Scotland and at funeral gate in the North etc.

It's clearly a policy that was developed by a mentaler that has no children of creche or school going age.

If that is the case for children you could be over a month isolating if you have a few kids

I can see it causing people not to test them and not want to be informed of being a close contact

Wow, the unvaccinated are the problem but no homework done first on other causes.

It truly is bonkers that those making these policies don't think beyond the nose on their face. On what planet is that a workable solution for parents of young children?

Our little fellas preschool sounds similar to yours and is being run by people that actually understand young children. I have to say the primary school our daughter attends is also very pragmatic as well.

When policies like this are so unworkable people will just ignore them, it means that the policy isn't worth the paper it's written on.

And what was the max number of unvaccinated in ICU, even if you took figures at face value there were at most 50 unvaccinated taking up an ICU bed at any time since vaccination rollout.

We have approx 50 more beds in ICU operating than we did coming into this mess.

There was some valid fear early in vaccine rollout that unvaccinated may take up too many resources and put too much stress on the health system, but this never panned out. This fear was stoked by public health officials, government and media long after trends were indicating no need for it. Reducing transmission was a red herring. Once elderly, vulnerable and anyone else that wants a vaccine have access to it, anything more is wasting energy, resources and money.

The unvaccinated are no more a burden than anyone else making lifestyle choices that might necessitate health intervention. Covid protocols in hospitals need to be scaled back ASAP.

Hospital numbers down to 940 today.

I really do think we have peaked already

I cant put this into scientific terms and I wont pretend to know what I'm talking about. But to me and many others it always looked like this will follow a pattern. And peak will be on January 8 - precisely like last year. To the day.

Not much of a prediction really if one cant put substance behind it, but here we are, January 8.

Which puts a certain light on our efforts to 'manage & curb' this virus. Lockdown, no lockdown, vaccinations no vaccinations, masks no masks, the list goes on -> January 8.

Maybe our own estimation of our ability to influence this thing is somewhat exaggerated?

His exact qoutes:

“Living with Covid He looked to the future of the pandemic and how Ireland will transition as the pandemic continues.The Taoiseach said: “We have to learn to live with it and when I say live with it, I don’t mean going back to pre-2019 as if it never happened.”

”Living with Covid means adapting and being flexible, having a strong annual vaccination programme. We’re looking at vaccine policy now for the next 12 weeks."

I think we will have another bigish drop in positives today. The testing bookings dropped significantly on Thursday in Dublin, they were slightly up yesterday.

14,555 new cases and just over 5K positive antigen tests uploaded.

Those numbers now become completely irrelevant.

PCR testing becomes largely unnecessary now and it's of little value to individuals to be posting their positive antigen tests to a database when only they need act on them themselves.

My estimate would be that 14k cases are maybe 25% of actually number and 5k of positive antigen test are maybe 5-10% of the actual number.

Within a week all we will be hearing from the HSE are hospital and ICU numbers. They are the only metrics that are both accurate and relevant.

Big time. Well the capability needs to remain in case another nasty variant or god forbid something else comes along but emphasis on pcr testing is ending imo. Money can be better spent elsewhere.