Gavan has conveniently forgotten about the Christmas debacle when the government decided to loosen the leash a bit more than âadvisedâ Tiny took the reigns after that and nphet have been running the country since
Yeah. Who could have predicted a spike in respiratory illness in January. Must have been the shops, or SantaâŚ
1 Like
Same reasoning as if you believe someone who claims to have been abducted by a flying saucer. It could be true
Gavan is useless. Himself, Rob O hanrahan and your man chambers are celeb reporters whose main function is to replay NPHET messaging and throw out an odd tweet like âwould love a pint haw hawâ getting a thousand likes from dim wits on Twitter.
3 Likes
With respect, is the point of the excess deaths figure not that it is an attempt to quantify the effects of that very clogging up?
I think that might have been an article you posted saying that Sweden had just had its biggest (or nearly biggest) number of deaths in a year ever and Labane or @Tierneevin1979 replied saying that was because of population increase.
I donât remember the specific conversation, but Iâd guess it was labane.
1 Like
Woolberto gave it to him good
Itâs going to be a little awkward at the next McKinsey alumni drinks
4 Likes
Wow.
Fair play to him for speaking out.
4 Likes
Among the many errors the lockdown proponents make is that there are only two options, lockdown or let it rip, and the let it rip approach results in health care collapse and massive death rates. @Malarkey constantly references this, and is ânot even wrongâ as itâs a myth and based on faulty reasoning.
A simplified analysis proves this without doubt. With no restrictions a âlet it ripâ strategy, based on the high R0 of Covid, would result in 90% of the population being infected in a matter of weeks. At an IFR of 1% to make the math easy, Ireland would have had 44,000 deaths and Sweden 100,000. This is what the simple models from the London College warned of, 2 - 3 million deaths in the US and about 600,000 deaths in the UK, and potentially much higher as health systems collapse and patients donât get the care they need.
Except it doesnât work that way and never has in a prior pandemic. Infection rates do not grow exponentially for long and herd immunity is never reached, simply because populations change their behavior based on the perceived risk. If you look at the infection and death curves for Europe from the first wave, you can clearly see that disease incidence had started to fall before lockdowns could have had any effect. Most tellingly, the overall cumulative death curves now for Sweden versus the rest of the EU are identical. Same in the US, Georgia was pilloried last year for lifting restrictions too early, yet itâs curve is the same as the rest of the country. Same with Florida and California, they end up in the same place, one with strict lockdown for over a year, the other abandoned lockdown after a few months.
It is my opinion and that of many experts far more qualified than I, that the effect of lockdowns and other government stringent restrictions in most western countries is very minor. The argument that without lockdowns transmission would continue to rise exponentially until herd immunity is reached is patently false. If it were true, why didnât Sweden have 100,000 deaths by summer of 2020 or Florida or Georgia have been utterly devastated, rather than having the same experience as states that stayed locked down.
What appears to be true is that peopleâs behavior changes with the actual realities, and this is what stops exponential growth. When hospitalizations and deaths climb they restrict their behavior, when they drop they relax. In other words itâs voluntary self imposed restrictions that make the difference, not what governments are imposing. Thatâs my theory and Iâm sticking to it for now at least.
5 Likes
Another fair query and so I will try to address it, best as I can. Have never said other than that I can muster hardly any certainties about this whole terrible process. I specified measures, typically emergency measures, a consideration for which infection rates are far more significant than âexcess deathâ rates.
First of all, âexcess death rateâ is not the same as Covid-linked or Covid-caused âdeath rateâ. To measure excess deaths against average deaths, typically done on an annual basis, you obviously require time â and time is precisely what this virus, where delay for a few days could be hugely significant three and four weeks later, does not allow. Beyond a certain point, infection rates are maths.
Item: Boris Johnson, in late 2020, was levered by his backbenchers into opening back up much more swiftly and much more broadly than was advisable. As that ordure hit the fan, his backbenchers kept a safe distance and went notably quiet. They are your basic fuckwits, Charles Walker very much included.
Now the fuckwits return, making the same noises as last year, having learned nothing. While part of this dynamic is pandering to stupidity, plenty of the dynamic is twinned ideological discomfort, unease about deep state action being required and unease about conceding that the earth is ultimately sovereign, not homo sapiens. Or is it mere coincidence that climate change deniers and Brexiteers are nearly to a man anti lockdown bugles? Among Brexitâs key aspects was an attempt to deny that nature, via geography, is sovereign, not homo Farage.
The bane of left wing perspectives is self righteousness and torpor. The bane of right wing perspectives is impatience and recklessness. My attitude is pragmatism, a case by case analysis. Lile any sensible person, I cannot countenance the chaos that would unfold from simply opening up society and letting the virus do its thing. Loons here deny this path is what they want, offering guff instead of logic. But King Ignoramus let that mask slip last night. All the while, they give no thought to the legal implications of compelling people to accept risk by going to work.
Impatience, as I sayâŚ
The loons are chidish, into the bargain. Ever present in their toxic melange is hostility, during crisis, to anyone with a public sector job. During boom, those same people sneer at anyone so unambitious as to work in the public sector.
Childishness, as I sayâŚ
Therefore I could not believe, logistically or ethically, âherd immunityâ via rampant infection rates was ever a runner. To say this option is an economic magic bullet remains the prerogative of loons, whether via The Barrington Declaration or on the internet. A lot of people have shown their truest colours over the last 12 months â and the timbre of those colours can never now be bleached.
The âexcess deathsâ canard essentially tries to say: âThese people, in actuarial terms, would have died in any case. We cannot do away with death blah blah blah.â This statement is incredibly stupid in any terms you like. First, modified behaviour will modify actuarial outcomes, short term and long term. The Japanese live longer in large part because of their diet. Second, at a far more immediate level, lots of people did not die last winter of flu because Covid precautions doubled as flu precautions. This hardly complex factor gets ignored by the loons when they prate about âexcess deathsâ.
I mean, does it not speak volumes that Dominic Cummings, King Loon, backed away from the herd immunity route? With no whispering involved?
1 Like
I really donât get this AZ pause. Like itâs either an emergency or itâs not. You have far greater chance of getting a bloody clot from flying or other medications so again itâs either an emergency or itâs not. Theyâve totally undermined that vaccine now. We have far too many experts and bodies trying to earn their keep and show importance.
13 Likes
In fairness they have as good as banned flying. One blood clot risk sorted
2 Likes
@Batigol, are you cunts interrogating people on where theyâve been when they land?
Whatâs stopping anyone from avoiding MHQ by flying indirectly through London or somewhere else?
Cunts?!!
2 Likes
Link here to an attempt at a reasonably real time view on excess death posted by the Society of Actuaries