Enough time has gone by for us to gain some perspective without forgetting what it was like. Any lessons learnt?
There are vast numbers of scientists who don't subscribe to the way covid was handled, in fact Covid was handled differently in different countries…..different 'the scientists', I suppose.
Many of our own celebrity scientists came out with all sorts of bunkem. McConkey said we'd have hundreds of thousands of deaths….Luke O'Neill said the vaccine, any vaccine were 100% effective. The amount of stuff that people have memory holed is absolutely wild.
The Facebook joke is still going….to be filed with 'my wifi is great since I got the vaccine with the chip in it' mwah amn't I hilarious…
The first thing that struck me was that I was not the only Irish person who doesn't know how far away 2-3-4 feet are(I knew this already but seeing ppl needing stickers to show them where it is, was heartening)
That there are so awesome speech writers in Leinster House, look at how it impacted on Irish/British relations when Boris came to visit.
That Leo was less sheltered that I assumed from his rich kid attitudes, comments about how there maybe more in your neighbourhood that you know and recommending people used the radius to get to know their full space and how 5k isn't any space in the country.
That some people(imc men) had such a strong reaction to being told to stay with in 5k or no closer than 3 feet and decided to ignore these things, impacting people who were dependant on people behaving cautiously in a global pandemic! Most of this group still holding grudges about being asked to behave in the common interest.
My cousin is a taxi driver in the UK. One day she pulled up behind a car that was stopped at some traffic lights. The driver in front got out, walked back to her car and started banging on her window. She rolled it down a little and he starts shouting at her for not leaving 3 feet between her car and his. "The government has told us we have to remain 3 feet apart!!".
Now, wrap your head around that one.
I heard the same story from a Dublin taxi driver. I didn’t believe him either 😂
Well I believe my cousin. I also believe some people could be that dumb.
The uneducated are idiots.
Many of the educated are as well.
Personally I had no problem with lockdown, but my wife was a bouncing off the walls initially before getting a handle on her panic. Dealing with her stress was the most stressful part of it.
I had via a previous job studied a bit about contagious diseases, had even been in Myanmar where the plague is still present, so I was comfortable that we were hunkered down. I had a pile of books that was waiting to be read.
Overall it changed our lives for the better, much better. It spurred my wife to transfer out of Dublin and we now have a lovely garden that we couldn't possibly afford in Dublin. I always pack a facemask for trains and flights and I've only been in a pub a couple of times since, although I was already sick of the pub scene before the pandemic.
I am discouraged by how easily people lost the plot, the whole "open the gyms" crowd made as much sense as those not understanding that a facemask is supposed to cover the nose as well as the mouth. It really exposed how infantile a good portion of adults are.
those not understanding that a facemask is supposed to cover the nose as well as the mouth. It really exposed how infantile a good portion of adults are
Jesus that remains my biggest bugbear. Someone wearing a mask with their runny nose poking out the top.
😅 Some people got the whole way through Covid with one disposable mask.
Lockdown was bliss with a young family. Loads of 1:1 time with kids without the distraction of running between sports, parties etc.
It definitely made me focus more on family time since.
yeah "open the gyms" for "me mental health" from gym bros who never gave a crap about people's mental health and then taken up by people who would think a kettle bell announces when the tea is ready
Workout at home, like the rest of us, ya prat
That they have written off everyone who has gotten long covid.
Denis o brien was commenting on the work from home phenomenon that was mandated for office workers during covid. He said it has caused a loss of effectiveness and productivity in the civil service. The operation of the state apparatus is not what it was before covid. That young graduates have become too entitled, they are demanding what their working terms are rather than the other way around. That Ireland is too dependent on multinationals revenue flows and that we are up for a rude awakening
It was 2 metres.
Yeah, one of Tony & Co's very costly errors imho. They really were in full patronising, we know best mode with this one & a few others.
I know some people (including a poster here) may say that they were worried about the efficacy & accuracy of people testing themselves at home, but firstly they could have verified that this belief was bogus by simply testing a test group & then let them test themselves, and secondly, the home testing kits were quite usable & quite accurate and the public health control gurus got it completely wrong imho. And worse when they were shown to have got it wrong, they arrogantly doubled down on their "don't rely on these home tests" muppet mantra....
Classic Tony!@
Is this Denis "Malta" O'Brian?
The "my Ooni pizza oven is bigger than yours" gang - a bit pathetic really.
There are few things more dangerous than a bureaucratic ideologue given too much power.
The way the Govt. handed over the running of the country to Tony Holohan was a disgrace.
He saw Covid as his big chance at personal redemption and by God was he going to take it.
Everything was viewed through the prism of infection numbers.
Children's education, social development and mental health could all be willing sacrificed to that end goal.
The billions that were wasted on Covid theatre which could have been channelled into improving society as a whole was obscene.
The worst thing is there's been no lessons learned and nobody held to account for the decisions which were made - so many of the public were complicit in the farce that there is simply no appetite to question any of the measures which were taken - that's all well and good but what happens next time?
Indeed. Infection numbers was a very dodgy metric, dependent on the number of tests being done which wasn't given along with the positive numbers. All cause mortality / excess deaths is much more meaningful, but it's easy to say that in hindsight I suppose.
You can only estimate those things well after the event, even then they are clouded in all kinds of statistical assumptions and uncertainties about population size and age etc.
Those numbers were being published but at the same time they were really paying attention to hospital numbers, ICU numbers and when that capacity is full then treatment not just for covid in jeopardy.
Agreed. But the choice of metric is important - as pointed out earlier there's a difference between being in hospital with covid and because of covid. Likewise with death figures.
Often it's not a neat divide. If someone has a serious respiratory issue then it's hard to say did covid put them there or will covid going to complicate their treatment and recovery. Covid implicated in heart attacks also. Would they have pulled through without covid even if it's for something that seems unrelated to the virus.
There was the antigen tests where he went against general European consensus and also when Europe opened up for limited travel after the first big lockdown where he declared nobody should be leaving the country. I was down in Kinsale for a weekend that summer and the place was full of Brit reg cars, complete joke. After that I largely stopped listening to him and I feel like bit by bit a large part of the country came round to the same line of thinking eventually.
Not sure I buy that he saw it as a chance for redemption, or he had an anti alcoholic agenda etc. Just that he was a bureaucrat with one single area of concern (keeping his hospital system running) who didn't need to worry about anything else and should never have effectively been handed over the reigns to the country. Throw in what appears to be more than a touch of arrogance on top of that and you got what we saw for the best part of 2 years.
Will lessons be learned from that? Not a chance, nobody involved has any interest in dragging up any mistakes they might have made.
If it were to happen again I'd still prefer a medical led strategy rather the chaos of trying to balance rights with care. we had been living in England just before the outbreak and I had accepted a position with the NHS. Everything I heard back from people I knew was chaos under the Johnson circus and I was so very glad that we had managed to get to Ireland for it.
My take is that we should have been going into lockdown sooner. Allowing people to still fly to Ireland from Italy for a rugby game that was cancelled because of outbreaks was lunacy.
You don't have to anti alcohol (which I am not) to know that the "meaningful Xmas" would lead to a massive spike again, yet Micheal Martin and the vintners got their way.
BTW, income tax still grew while hospitality was shuttered so there was no economic case for that awful mistake.
Yes, too slow to lockdown initially then later there were times later I felt we should have stuck out Level 3 instead swing between opening up and back into lockdown.
Infection numbers were never a reliable measure of actual numbers of cases (and since so many cases were mild, it doesn't really matter), but if the numbers went up or down week to week, then we could at least tell if we were going in the right direction or not.
The excess deaths figures are the most compelling proof that what we did was BROADLY effective in protecting the population. There were some major clangers (Christmas 2020) but relative to most other developed countries we nailed it.
Everyone was flying blind really so anyone saying in retrospect that there was a best way to "manage" the initial infection spread still doesn't understand that viruses don't cooperate. Compared to many so called advanced economies we did do well.
It's amazing that the USA went from Bush Jr describing such a pandemic as the biggest national threat to a shyster calling it a flu.
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