Reflection on the pandemic: questions about the authorities' response.

Feeley's comments in the context of an infectious disease made no sense.

And time has shown no such thing. There is considerable debate about the extent of the excess deaths when age adjusted, and other factors in play such as heatwaves, aging population, and long covid - which is something else Feeley conveniently ignores.

In Scotland excess deaths when adjusted for demographics changes are returning to or below previous years.

https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/news/2023/excess-deaths-in-february-at-lowest-level-for-a-year

Not sure how you think children's education could have been maintained in any other way, with teachers falling ill and the risk of them passing on a disease potentially deadly to their parents and carers and teachers.

If you think those things are 'immeasurable', then the same must apply in spades for the consequences of Europe not applying restrictions etc etc. Which completely undercuts therefore your entire argument.

Feeney seems to think the disparate age impact was a game changer, but that's not the point. It was only one piece of the equation.

What Feeney really gets wrong, is that he talked only of the direct risk of covid to someone by age but conveniently leaves out that people not at high risk from covid can spread it to those who are. Well if you don't think through the implications of that of course you will not understand why the restrictions were necessary. That is the risk assessment he is not correct on, just how infectious covid is, and the implications of that.

Is an element of 'fear', for want of a better word, part of public health campaigns against smoking? Drink driving? STDs? Yes or no?

So yes, there is a comparison to be drawn when that word in particular is used.

Was the intensity greater, yes. But that is only to be expected given a global pandemic of a highly infectious disease and is reflected in the response of every major health authority in the world to the risk covid posed to public health systems.

As it is to be expected there would be huge coverage of it in the media. And given 21st century media there would be overload of coverage.

And yes, as part of public health campaigns, ads are placed eg in other media such as Spotify etc etc

In terms of impact on people, as it noted in the article the very real images from Italy had a huge impact. As much if not more so than anything that came later via intentional health campaigns.

From early in the pandemic the HSE messaging was that the vast majority of cases would be mild, which does not strike me as the mantra of someone trying to spread hysteria.

Was there a measured debate in England? France? Germany? What does that mean in practice?

What's the difference in Ireland? The difference here is that we didn't have the wiggle room with regard to hospital and ICU capacity. That's why NPHET's 'abundance of caution' seemed to dictate to the government more than authorities did in other countries. If you look back at threads you will see posts from me arguing eg to stick with Level 3 in autumn 2020 for longer instead of lockdown, and good points made on this forum that we should have opened up more outdoors for summer in 2020. I don't think any 'debate' would have changed what happened in practice, because it would have come back to the parlous state of our health service and no one wanting to take a calculated risk with it.

So I'm not saying we got everything right, but I understand why things were done the way they were.

Think the deciding factor was simply lack of supply.

In the early stages the consideration re: masks was for direct protection, and use of masks for direct protection those caveats apply. That was reinforced by lack of supply, and early misinformation from China that spread was primarily by touch transfer (fomite) instead of respiratory.

What changed was more masks, more understanding that it spread primarily by respiratory droplets and a mental shift to thinking about masks for the general public to contain infectious droplets from an infected person - rather than directly protect the wearer.

All of this has been discussed in detail on the masks thread, so don't want to go into any more detail here.

Not through skin, I think more like ebola or norovirus, spread by fomite transmission primarily.

100% agree. I also maintain that the IT Health Editor's insistence on giving Dr Feeley a good kicking in that recent article amounts to an admission of guilt. Shameful "journalism".

Nope. "Dr." (nurses don't get the title) John was (he's retired) not a bad nurse, but how he has acted on YouTube has had issues. I don't think he is as bad as @Beasty portrays him but I am not a mod who would have extra info.

How does that article in which you incorrectly say he was given a " good kicking " amount to either an "admission of guilt" ( ?) or " shameful journalism " ?

Please explain because all I read in that piece was a man ( yes I know he is a surgeon but still in this regard an ignorant man ) making ill judged and unscientific comments , straight out of a playbook used by some very unscrupulous individuals , which is a bit of a joke frankly when he is accusing others of not following the science , and a journalist who is trying to present the mainstream , but in this case alternative view, for some balance.

It beggars belief that a doctor would think that letting a new and potentially severe infection RIP without vaccine or treatment , would somehow be ok for young and old. It was pretty obvious to most people that not only was he very out of date as regards infection control but aggressively and dangerously ignorant . He was and is an embarrassment, espousing failed herd immunity narrative when a lot of his, mainly old , patients would have been dead if he had been allowed to carry on regardless.

I have nursed some very sick younger people from Covid , some of whom took months to recover , and while they had no underlying conditions prior to infection , they had a raft of them afterwards. So the spiel about young being alright is just that , bs . Many have recovered now but some have now been diagnosed with vulnerability and underlying conditions that they never knew they had before.

There were other media sources who were completely unbalanced and generated fear in their reporting on both sides , RTE.. Clare Byrne was dreadful , and Gript on the other side equally appalling.

IT was balanced throughout and made some attempt at reporting and interpreting what was going on , without just regurgitating NPHETs words .

It was difficult because, let's face it, for quite a while there was no other Irish news happening except for Covid and largely through daily numbers updates from HSE, DoH and NPHET , so not a lot of deviation possible from that, except to outright deny facts and figures being reproduced. I do remember the likes of Paul Cullen who you are slating , asking very pointed questions in the briefings for instance , questions that many here were asking , and I respect him for that .

@shesty As regards fear ..

There was fear prior to vaccination , very much so and those early variants were nasty and killed people , a fact which some, it would seem , would like to wipe from memory. Maybe it's not in their own memory, but it is in mine and many others . So it was genuine urgency from public health to get whatever the message was across by any means. The fact that the message was frequently not bang on the money in the beginning is really a pointless argument , knowledge in hindsight while valuable, is in short supply when you are in the midst of it and those emergency methods tried and tested previously are what is used until you can gain insight in real time .

We all know , now ..

It is unfortunate that people like Clare Byrne made her entire career out of every silly little thing Covid and that TH was so much to the fore behaving like he was making all the decisions, and being the boss , but the plain fact is our creaky health service would have been utterly overrun and swamped if restrictive actions were not taken . Especially in that first 18 months. As it was it was pushed to the limit.

This is known and accepted now , whether we like the way it happened or not.

You only have to look at the disaster that was the last six months with Covid , flu and RSV to see that if Covid was allowed RIP in the early days , we could not have coped and people would have been traumatised in a whole other way .

I have discussed this before on this thread with some who deny the seriousness of the illness prior to vaccination / immunity / less severe variants ( not you ) Also denying deaths numbers , and the positive effects of vaccinations . And some are still trying , unsuccessfully for the most part , to argue that vaccinations are killing people now , when all the data so far shows very small numbers of deaths from vaccines .

Lets talk about that fear although very much not real , being spread by some ..or is it just MSM that gets the flak ?

I remember when warnings about AstraZeneca were put out there with restrictions on the age groups it could be given to, saying it should be removed from the rollout completely and being called all sorts , because people wanted their shots , and wanted them NOW !

Likewise discussing early on in the vaccine rollout that new variants were appearing more dangerous than before ( Delta from India at the time ) or that they were probably likely to mutate to evade the vaccines, I was savaged . This was not scare tactics just honest discussion on this forum about a subject of which I had knowledge .

It was pretty difficult to get a clear message about what was happening and not to scare people . It was a scary subject to be fair , for most people .

I know you know how variable even the milder Omicron infection can be from other discussions we gave had . Some relatively young people were hit harder than expected not with the infection but the after effects . Thankfully that seems to be less and less of a problem .

I think we are all going through the post traumatic stress of the last few years in different ways trying to rationalise what we did , how we reacted , what we had to cope with day to day , all at different levels and different kinds of PTSD.

Some respond by denying , others by minimising , others by continuing to try to learn more about it , others by blocking all the bad stuff .

Most of us will get over it and have done already, but it won't be forgotten by any of us who were working in hospitals in that first year .

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/health/working-during-covid-was-a-scary-time-we-havent-forgotten-any-of-it-the-fear-was-real-42329074.html

So yes to summarise , the media WAS used to get the message out there . That would be standard practice the world over . Some journos were responsible and made sure they reported the facts and not sensationalist rubbish , others were only out for clicks and money and gain at any cost . Unfortunately that's the same as every other news day .

What do people expect , that a leaflet in the door and weekly numbers in the news , as with other less dangerous public health campaigns , like flu , would have prevented the vast majority from going out and mixing as normal in a pandemic of proportions never seen in our lifetimes ? Not a chance ...usual campaigns eg flu , only reach on average 30% of the targeted population normally .

This was a major emergency and a real case of life, if the message got across , or death for many if it didn't in the early months . It was not only urgent but essential to use any and all means to get the message across , painful as that may be .

I don't blame the media by and large for that as the DoH and the HSE used them , but some really ran with it for far too long .

Hopefully we won't see the like again .

Whether another pandemic would generate similar media coverage though , probably . That's how they make their money isn't it ?

I agree with you about the 'tried and tested'.

It is a fallback, is what I meant, when in crisis, but once the data starts to come in, changes should be made. This would be my criticism too that cogwheels of power moved too slowly to change the message. Went from high alert to 'off a cliff/ no worries now ' , no explanation.

Obviously there was a time in between that they knew that everything was changing but the media did not get that message.

Can't comment about the A&E situation in relation to this.

I think it was the one of the times politicians had to make decisions based on what will definitely happen but hasn't happened yet due to the lag from cases to hospitalisations. They hate doing that as they get all of the blame without pointing to what they were preventing (other than comparisons to other countries like Italy which local populations find a nebulous comparison, India also got caught the same way with Delta).

Calling in the IMF was similar.

A more recent example was the US telling everyone what russia was going to do in Ukraine but Europe only reacting after it happened, there are some very cringey posts from the days before the invasion (with a lot of those posters intersecting with the anti-restrictions crowd on here).

I don't know what you are referring to there. I think I understand well the' lag of cases to hospitalisations ' but that was not what I was talking about?

The rest of this...what relevance to my post?

It was a comment about this:

Because of the lag time it meant it was fairly dramatic swings which was hard for the public to understand and hard for the government to message effectively.

"we should learn from it.I just don't think we will" - unfortunately I don't disagree. I'm holding on to a faint glimmer of hope that doctors will be more savvy next time round. They were completely steamrolled by the media, who in turn were facilitated by "public scientists" that got drunk on the public attention. I know many GP's who are still stunned by what transpired during Covid and are having to deal with the repercussions of lockdown in their surgeries on a daily basis.

Wow, the veritable stampede of healthcare workers getting their boosters that some on here assured us would happen doesn’t seem to have materialised. What a shocker.

Where was I " worried about" TH and his appointment?

Stop making stuff up in order to have something to post.

None of that is relevant to pandemic reflections, just people with a gripe about personalities.

Be great if one of you came up with something new and relevant to.. talk.. about instead of venting about public servants.. Very tiresome.

Edit .spelling .

If he had landed that job during Covid , when PCR testing was up and running it would be worthy of discussion .

Now its derisory.

Funny he used to be revered here and you couldn't critisize him, but now he goes against your Covidian view you dismiss him - and seems you can't praise him.

Fact is, he's been pretty much spot on throughout this as and as the data comes in he is being proved right.

No facts in his posts , smoke, mirrors and misinformation.

Who" revered" him ? Not here or any of the main Covid threads.

You are mixing up this thread with some other that extols the extremely doubtful virtues of Ivermectin and Vit D .

Theres a lot more to long covid than your post would suggest.

Here is just one study which shows blood flow differences

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32275-3

All I see here is a desperate need to spin / downplay results. Whatever way you spin the results it shows large numbers of people experiencing long covid symptoms.

Covid is a highly infectious disease so even if its long term effect was 'only' comparable with other respiratory diseases that is still significant for public health:

"We found that 39.6% of individuals in the COVID-19–positive group reported moderate to severe impairments across any of the evaluated PROMIS well-being domains at follow-up."

This is a version of long covid too:

People infected with SARS-COV-2 had more than three times the risk of dying over the following year compared with those who remained uninfected.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(22)00087-4/fulltext

The study you have linked is hardly conclusive given its noted limitations. It notes another study showing cognitive impact from long covid and then says:

"Furthermore, those with the most severe disease may have been unable or unwilling to participate; it is possible that those too ill to participate were at higher risk of experiencing long-term symptoms after COVID-19. It is also possible that those with cognitive impairment may have been less likely to enroll."