Ferries, business and cargo travel, and land travel from NI to Ireland.
Ireland imports most of it’s food and all of it’s medicine, not practical to shut down all travel.
The reality is once you have one case, it spreads quickly. It’s unrealistic to expect you can stop any case getting in.
Very reduced chance. Air passenger travel is by far the biggest risk.
The first case on the island was the woman in Belfast who flew into Dublin.
Did she not get the leaflet?
Was it 25,000 people the Gov asked to return home from their holidays in Spain in the middle of March?
And people are trying to say air travel had nothing to do with it?
Give me strength.
The reality is though there has been little to no community spread in New Zealand, or indeed many Asia Pacific countries. Ireland has had a lot of community spread, especially to the most vulnerable populations.
Keep in mind a viral outbreak starts with one person. If the first case in Ireland was say February 1 (it was likely much earlier), do the math on cases doubling every 3 days to lockdown with no further cases coming in. It’s roughly 100k cases. That’s one case causing 100k cases, a lot less than 3%.
Once again, all you need is one case to start an epidemic.
Once infections get to a certain stage community spread is inevitable.
I’d be interested to see what the breakdown of the first 1,000 cases were and the timeline in reaching there.
Aspirational fuckwads on their skiing holidays and trying to fit 4/5 weekend breaks in the year (teachers most likely culprits here) fucked us.
For now it has to be all about containment - Ireland as an island has all the ability to suppress this and contain it. The border is obviously a big issue, it has to be an aligned thinking but the best chance is to ground air passenger travel for a minimum of at least the remainder of 2020 and probably well into 2021.
The aspirational fuckwads will probably protest about their liberties of not being able to travel, teachers will strike at not being able to get photos for their social media accounts from their mid term breaks to Lisbon and Budapest.
But fuck them.
You aren’t debating on the relevant facts at had. Bizarre as usual.
The inverse of your point is also the case, the fewer infected people you let in the slower the spread. It doesn’t make sense that travel restrictions have no impact.
He’s our Marcel the monkey.
I’ve never argued that we can’t close our borders - just that politically it may not be the best thing to do in terms of our relationship with the EU, the US or the UK. “Border Controls” as referenced above is a long way from closing borders too by the way but we’ll leave that aside.
Either way, that’s ignoring my central question which at this stage you seem to be purposely dodging. Whether we like it or not, at this point in time there are two separate countries on the island (unlike NZ as I’m sure you’ve astutely noticed). Do you think it is possible/feasible to secure the border with the North (and as a result the rest of the UK)?
No, it only has to start, not get to a certain stage. Without a complete lockdown community spread of an infectious disease is inevitable, once you have one infection. The only hope of stopping this outbreak was in Wuhan.
This is a the basic fact that the lockdown merchants don’t get. You can only slow the rate of transmission with the measures taken, unless you lock everyone into their homes and don’t allow them out, you cannot eradicate a virus. You also have to ban all inward travel, so no food or medicine for Ireland sadly.
You were the one that brought in the 3% Tim. Another misleading stat brought in to suit an argument. Just waiting on the graphical misrepresentation.
How so? The EU have no problem with it whatsoever. You said they would frown at it. Glad you’ve clarified.
And to answer your second point; Portugal seem to have fared ok despite having a land border with Spain. Spain have one of the highest rates in Europe yet Portugal have fewer cases than Ireland even though having twice the population. Note that Ireland only have a land border with a very small part of the UK.
Ireland had plenty of prior notice before it hit here, they had all the advantages to prevent or curtail it but failed to take the right measures in a timely fashion.
New Zealand have shown this.
Neither is defying them on a €13bn tax bill but I suppose it’s a good excuse to hide behind anyway.
Yes okay, Irish citizens abroad are not allowed back for a year so. What a bizarre line of thinking.
The Ro level is what it is. I have already pointed out, Ireland has only a couple of hundred more cases than New Zealand related directly to travel. Those are the facts as we have them.
Here is the cases at around 1,000 for Ireland (1,100 for reference), March 23rd;
That’s 33% directly from travel. NZ’s direct rate as posted earlier is 38%.
Should air travel not have been shut down immeadiately when the virus was taking a grip in Europe?
Should lockdown not have been fast tracked once we had our first official case?
The government were far, far too slow to act in both these cases.
33% is damning, so around 333 people brought this virus in by air travel - 333 spreaders.
And a further 240 people were infected by them - that’s over half.
How long did it take Ireland to reach 1k confirmed cases as opposed to NZ?
