Five years on, what did COVID teach you?

95% of adults took treatment which reduced their chances of dying from a new virus (vaccines reduce the chance of death/hospitalizations from the virus)

Nitwits and anti-establishment and "I'm not a sheeple" types took Ivermectin or drank bleach or didn't get vaccinated and then unnecessarily died in ICU's.

Reading the testimonials from ICU nurses on people who couldn't believe they were dying from a "fake disease" and a "little flu" is harrowing stuff.

Many would their mental health and stress levels improved with the lockdowns, so considering the lockdowns were the exception to the norm I'd be more interested in mental health studies on why there's elevated stress in normal conditions.

but the vaccine did little to stop that.

What testimonials from ICU Nurses in Ireland? I cant find one eyewitness (nor remember anything more than a politican like leo or MM) report saying what you said.

Well I didn't drink bleach - however I didn't die in the pandemic of the unvaccinated (as per Leo) , in fact did anybody who didn't take the vaccine die? Stats would indicate it was all people who were already ill and over 83 year olds who died.

Yet we sacrificed the young kids and their development - see Baroness Hallett report in UK. The same happened here.

in ireland we had vaccine passports at public gatherings for months after NPHET knew the vaccine didn't stop transmission.

It also taught us that common sense isn't very common when it comes to governance. The proposal to close pubs at 5pm, 1h45min maximum time in a premises when it spreads in less than 15 minutes, 5,000 people at a rugby match one weekend and 50,000 the previous weekend. An 18 year old had to be protected - against a disease that killed very few people under the age of 70 - for the good of his own health before he could enter a premises. No facemasks when sitting down but they had to go on when standing up

Looking back some of these regulations were nothing short of daft

Most places it was normal service once your meal was served. Actually eating it was not required.

But it still did the intended job of cutting down customer number.

if you read more you'd know there was no need for a lockdown of the length and severity.

The vaccine greatly, greatly reduced transmission. There is no such thing as 100% effectiveness.

nobody asked for 100% but as low as 13% effective when in households… a lot higher in social settings.

for all that restriction , money spend , social cost and of course hype when most people never needed it.

was it worth the cost? no.

Some cliquey pubs "reserved" certain tables for their favourite regulars when it came to outdoor drinking - saw it first hand when we tried to book a table one Sunday afternoon - we were told "all booked up" - noticed that some tables had "Reserved" on them. Walked past the same pub 2 hours later and the same tables were still unoccupied….

When you consider that there is no such thing as "no risk" in any part of our lives. The risk of the 80 year old dying was minimal before vaccination and with vaccination was through the floor. The risk of the 18 year old dying, even before vaccination, was crazy low

It is always important to protect our elderly, just as much as it is to protect every other person in our populace. We did that by closing down nursing home access to the public and moving potential-but-untested COVID patients from our hospitals into our nursing homes. In hindsight the second part might not have been a very good protection measure

I'd argue, putting pubs to one side, it is important that the 80 year old you refer to sees his/her family as much as possible before they die but we seem to have lost sight of that.

Pubs still do that because they want to look after their regulars, nothing new there. If the pub back then wanted to "close the doors" at 11 o clock for their regulars they didn't want an outsider there who might have reported them

Then there was the travel rules. They said you needed to stay in your country but then gave us a "green list" but then you weren't stopped from going anywhere in reality. People flew to Spain for some winter sun where everything was open and then chastised on their return as if they'd broken numerous laws

That was in summer 2020, because we got the covid numbers so low other countries also with low numbers allowed us to travel to their countries. I went to Budapest that August, Hungary was a green list country everything was open there like normal. Of course the media were guilt tripping anyone who travelled even though it was an EU scheme to get Europe opened up again. If Tony had his way nobody would have been able to travel but that was one of the few areas where the government allowed european politics to trump Tony holohan.

Less visitors to the house or interaction with neighbours since the pandemic - apart from the odd visit from family members . People seem to have continued with keeping themselves to themselves or maybe that's a societal change in general….