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

BA.5 is now like having viral meningitis according to the die hard Loonies 😆. Do we think we could get a vaccine to cure these clowns anytime soon ? 🤡

Some positive news this morning. Hospitals dropped from 885 to 849. Lots of discharges. I’d say we aren’t too far away from the peak.

Thank you for the good wishes.

Another China headline: Zero-Covid strategy shuts down north-central city of 13 million following 18 reported cases of Omicron!

It does now seem BA.5 can cause more serious disease. It’s now believed to infect the lungs more easily like before with the Delta variants etc.

However thankfully because of the mass infections of BA.1 and BA.2 ( more importantly) along with vaccinations it has created a lot of immunity against serious illness in our population hence why our hospitals aren’t rising like they did with BA.2 and people are not getting as sick.

Statement without foundation.

If you look at Sweden, which did not lockdown, it has a noticeably higher excess death than its peer neighbours (which did have restrictions and therefore to some extent buttressed Sweden) while still having same economic contraction.

England tried to follow the Swedish strategy - do you remember the parties at Cheltenham - and had to abandon it as hospitals filled up. Going into lockdown a week earlier could have saved thousands of lives.

Coronavirus: enforcing UK lockdown one week earlier 'could have saved 20,000 lives' | Coronavirus | The Guardian

The go to is always to compare Sweden with its peer Scandinavian countries, which most resemble it in density and culture. If we were discussing any topic (not just covid), they would be the first countries any intellectually honest person assessing Sweden's performance at X would compare them to.

One of lowest population density countries in Europe, surrounded by other lower end population density countries which did lockdown, compares well with high population density countries and countries with mega cities? When considering the spread of an infectious disease?

Country after country imposed measures for the same reason. They saw the deaths rising and they saw the hospitals filling up. This is not pure speculation, this is the declared and evidential reason documented for that decision. Anything else is "pure speculation" without foundation.

Therefore to suggest measures should be judged only on the profile of those that died is an incomplete if not disingenuous basis.

Untrue. Florida did lockdown, and had regional lockdowns on Miami region.

The Dakotas? Let me guess, low population density state surrounded by states which did impose lockdowns or measures?

Yeah, you might get away with that to an extent when you are a Dakota or a Sweden, it simply doesn't scale. Try it in London, New York, Paris or region wide and see what happens.

Are the figures age adjusted?

In 2015 there were 2.9 million people over 80 in the UK.

In 2021 there were 3.2 million.

https://www.mha.org.uk/get-involved/policy-influencing/facts-stats/

I'll repost what I wrote yesterday and other posters can judge for themselves whether you just have a poor recollection or are deliberately trying to be deceptive. So perhaps you should have that argument with yourself.

This is what I wrote:

There was a massive shift in behaviours e.g. working from home, economic activity dropped as much versus countries which did lockdown, detectable reductions in people's radius of travel. To a large extent they locked themselves down.

It was clear from my posts today it was in relation to government measures.

It's done before an operation apparently.

Do you ever actually read posts? I said against serious illness. I’ll repeat serious illness. The much less hospitalisations in this wave proves my point or do you have a better explanation? Look especially at the SA data.

All surges have been caused by travelin the first place. A new virus is one plane ride away from here. Anyway how can you 'nearly' catch it?

No that would be down to vaccinations , not getting infected again and again with Omicron .

Made that distinction in my post ...if you read my post properly !

And by the way you never mentioned SA , but if you want to ...their age demographic is very different to ours .

" It seems the vaccines are still preventing serious disease "

How is it a well known fact ?

Produce evidence to back that up .

All I have seen ...data and evidence, that is ... including the link to the very large study in my post above , that you obviously did not read , Mickey, says the opposite .

And it is waning , that is why their are more elderly back in hospital now . And that is why they are trying to encourage more if that age group to get their second booster .

It's not PROVEN to be more pathogenic , just that it MIGHT be affecting lungs more .

We were all infected quickly because we never had Omicron before and I'll give you that , but it's not PROVEN that it gives any immunity at all to the other Omicron variants .

If it is then I promise you I will come back here and say your hunch was right , ok ?

But up to then it's just a hunch / opinion.

Night .

"If every country had done the same they would have had similar outcomes"

Statement without foundation. Already dealt with earlier with reference to their low population density disproven by comparison with their neighbours - but ignored by you.

"Fit and healthy people in no danger from COVID"

Statement without foundation. 15% of Covid deaths in the US were under 80 \ without other conditions. The ICU and hospitalisation admissions here also disprove your statement. If it can put you into ICU then yes it is a danger to you.

No I didn't say that at all. Not unless we wanted to have at least the same excess deaths Sweden did and have thousands more dead Irish citizens. Plus we share an open border with the UK. Perhaps read the entirety of the posts you are responding to instead of just the bits you want to quote out of context.

Another dishonest attempt at deliberate misrepresentation of what another poster has written.

This is what I wrote:

There was a massive shift in behaviours e.g. working from home, economic activity dropped as much versus countries which did lockdown, detectable reductions in people's radius of travel. To a large extent they locked themselves down.

Did the Sweden implement government mandated lockdown or restriction measures in wave 1? Nope. You know this, and I know this.

In the sentence I clearly drew the distinction between countries which did lockdown, and Sweden's voluntary action.

So either you are dishonestly misrepresenting what I posted OR if you genuinely think Ireland and Sweden had the same lockdown measures then you have ended your own internal debate.

I think this conversation is done if this is the route you're going down.

Are only people under 44 allowed to be 'fit and healthy'?

I wasn't aware the entire older working age population & active retired were not fit and healthy.

How many people in Ireland fall into your definition of 'not fit' / 'not healthy'?

And are you just prepared to write them off?

In the first instance, the claim we shut down the entire economy is strawman nonsense. If the entire economy was shutdown, how were these supermarket workers going to work? You're tripping over your own nonsense.

The measures were to slow the spread of the virus. It is an infectious disease. It spread from your 'fit and healthy' to the rest. Some of them were getting sick from covid and ending up in hospital - but the main reason was to stop the infections spreading. Medical staff, care home staff, carers, the vulnerable, all of them still had to interact with the rest of the country to access essential services. We couldn't quarantine them away unless you think you could conscript them in barracks for the duration.

And further asked and answered below:

In the US 50% of Covid deaths were under 80, and 15% of deaths were in under 80s without underlying conditions.

Look at the ICU and hospitalisation admissions for covid. The ones who pulled through weren't people who were going to die without covid. They were people, in many cases 'active retired' age groups or with conditions with reasonable expectation of many years of life, who needed medical treatment. Medical treatment that would not have been there, or would have been severely curtailed \ limited \ triaged in the event of the cases overwhelming medical capacity.

And not only people with covid, everyone in need of medical attention would have been facing the same difficulties in accessing hospital care.

And there you have the reasons why country after country reacted as they did.