"Nobody cares about Covid anymore"

Again this is all discussed and argued in depth elsewhere on the appropriate thread.

Your figures are totally incorrect and inaccurate . Where are you getting them? If you want to discuss this provide reliable links otherwise its just the usual piffle.

We just seemed to be slow to adopt anything sensible. I remember self-testing had become a thing in the UK, much of continental Europe etc and the US, while we had so-called Irish experts taking excptionalist views on it about how it wouldn't work. That resulted in a total over dependence on PRC testing for ages, which wasn't able to keep up and in most cases wasn't achieving very much anyway.

Loads of people I know were rushing off to get tested when they knew 100% they had COVID and were self isolating anyway, but desperately needed a test because that's what they were being constantly told.

We didn't get any sense of what was going on nationally because all of the resources were going into testing people who knew they were positive and very little seemed to be going into establishing trends, heat maps or anything else.

As for the testing and isolating - I remember people going to McDonalds with the kids or off to the play ground, all of whom had just been down to the test centre because of suspected covid.

We absolutely do need to have a very serious look at what happened over those years. Billions upon billions were spent and people's lives were turned upside down and inside out.

There's still an extremely arrogant sweeping aside of anyone who dares say that the response was not very good or was way out of line with peers in many cases.

The worst issue is that any sensible discussion is hijacked by conspiracy theorists with all sorts of insane notions.

Any pragmatic discussion of any of this is driven into the fringes and it's doing a huge disservice to forward planning or any kind of analysis of what happened or how it could be improved upon.

Ah look, you made a claim that Sweden changed to follow the rest of Europe with similar lockdown measures, etc from Dec 20 on.

Yet I was able to respond to your BS claim with an Irish Times article , authored by someone living in Sweden from Feb '21, showing this was simply not the case at all!

For instance they didn't close their cafés & restaurants, gyms, sports facilities, workplaces, cancel their state exams, shut down their private hospitals and a whole lot more!!!

Some may still think it is a little too early for definitive judgments, but all the current indicators are that Ireland locked down both too severely, but mostly for far,far too long, for it's citizen's greater good, and this has defeated the purpose of the whole exercise.

I.e. This has resulted in worse health on aggregate in the population, which has since caused higher excess death rates than otherwise would have been the case, and all this was done at massive expense in monetary terms certainly, but also in the terrible disruption to people's lives, over hugely & unnecessarily elongated time frames, including really stupid things like completely sabotaging & shutting down private sector health provision in this country, and other such daft measures such as cancelling of state exams, forbidding outdoor sports, walks in the forests, etc, etc, etc. This overshooting of common sense through many daft, draconian measures, implemented for far,far too long, has ultimately cost Ireland far more lives and much poorer general health outcomes than Covid could ever have wrought in itself.

In summary, imho, the cure was worse than the disease.

(And far worse at that!!)

P.s. further these measures were imposed on the Irish people by a very arrogant, self regarding medical elite (I.e. certain members of Nphet) who have now been shown (nearly definitively) to have done the country a massive disservice in the policies they helped impose.

P.p.s anyone who is still expressing an outmoded belief that Ireland's lockdown strategy was either measured, or even nearly correct, are completely wrong and misguided imho. They are either totally 'stuck in the mud', or must have a vested interest in continuing to hold these views (e.g. working for the HSE, or whatever), as all credible evidence now is pointing to otherwise.

Ireland got it wrong, (deal with it), lockdown cost far too much in damagjng people's lives, lifestyles, health, well being & economic & other well being to be justifiable imho. All credible indicators currently support this view. Sorry.

It was a new disease, people were catching it in increasing numbers, people were dying, we had supply issues with ventilators, we didn't have vaccines, staff in hospitals were stretched to the limit, ICU's were filling up. Then cases started to rise, exponentially. Of course we had a lockdown, like most other countries. It made reasonable sense at the time and the vast majority of the public supported it.

There was of course the economic trade-off, but money can be borrowed, lives can't be replaced. People with other health issues would have been heavily impacted if our national health system had become overwhelmed. Anyone can nitpick a thousand things about the mesaures/restrictions were perfect hindsight. We did what most other countries did.

Sure we have all said here and elsewhere about the madness of the closing of private hospitals and stopping of cancerscreening for so long ..what ...you think you are coming up with anything new here ?

What is novel is that you are continuing with the nonsense about Sweden when it has been shown that they had o many more deaths in the first year when they had to revise their approach following from that .

If they have come out of it well after that it is because they have and always have had , a superior health care system to ours, well funded , better staffed, and more resilience built in in the form of extra beds and planning .

This ...is what we need to take from Sweden's strategy ,and if this government and future ones would build that into forward planning , we would be in a stronger position to deal with anything that may come in the form of a pandemic or natural disaster .

If we had had a stronger health service with more beds ,staff , and better strategic public health planners we might have gotten away with less strict/ shorter lockdowns, especially once vaccinated . Because the risk of our health service being overwhelmed would have been less .

This is why Sweden could afford not to be as strict in the second year of the pandemic even when they did introduce restrictions . Also vaccinations started then .

While nobody denies that there are some poorer health outcomes as a result of reduced screening and services generally ,there is as big, if not bigger long tail coming from Long Covid .

Many poor health outcomes are as a result of Covd infection. These are now reducing our frail health service's ability to move on and get back to any semblance of normality. People with heart disease , diabetes,neurological and respiratory disorders, all either triggered, or existing disease exacerbated Covid infection to a degree and a range ,never seen before with other viruses .

But still our health bosses talk about reducing waiting times and fiddle around the edges instead of attacking the issues of not enough beds, services or staff which is the core of our inability to get to grips with waiting lists and A+E waiting times .

I agree.

So many people who were undergoing treatment were less exposed to organisms other than Covid which normally would have been lethal.

It was an ill wind, indeed.

Not to mention the changes people made to their quality of life if they could.. wfh and moving out of the cities.

It'll take a while before all the effects and ill effects are really apoarent and measurable.

But missed 'potential ' diagnoses is ..

In Covid the health service was beyond capacity and some treatment was inevitably going to suffer. The particular things that were done may not have been ideal in retrospect, and we should learn from this, but some damage somewhere was inevitable. My objection is that the points made about cancer is not usually about the specific details, which might have been done differently, but are usually part of an anti lockdown argument which suggested that Covid should have been let rip.

Those videos were made by people after or before their shifts, or lunch break.

I admire your optimism but I don't think any lessons have been learned from our response to Covid. I don't think the general public even want to learn any lesson from it, which is great news for the politicians who presided over it. There is a cognitive dissonance amongst a huge swade of the population, many of whom can't bring themselves to believe in the waste of time and money and recourses the response to Covid entailed.

I think next time we will make the exact same mistakes again - a double-down if you will.

The sad fact is there are people who would willingly flush another €100bn down the tubes rather than admit they were wrong - the ego is a fragile yet powerful thing.

 Good luck with them trying to scare us into more restrictions or lockdowns.

I think the vast majority of people understood that restrictions were a necessary evil. While nobody liked it, the overwhelming sentiment was of getting on with it for the greater good. When the next pandemic comes, I'd imagine the majority will again do what is right.

It was an already-disaffected minority of people who had the biggest issues with it, and are still complaining about it to this day.

We cannot and should not pander to people who protest against anything and everything, because they will never be happy. All we can do is make the best decisions we can, and hope the loonies don't cause too much harm to the rest of us while they're spreading disease/beating up immigrants/protesting at libraries/etc.