We have Gardai on roads all over the country as it is. And itâs not as if we donât have institutional knowledge in this country about how to police a border. We were doing it until 25 years ago. I grew up with the border being policed. The EU does not have the final say about what you do with your borders in an emergency, no matter what people say. The individual state does.
Zero covid âŚa hape of full time permanent prestigious jobs for sam and co. If there is covid we need a zero covid infrastructure. If there is zero covid, well theyâre doing their job so. Rain made, so to speak.
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What about people who live in Dundalk and work in Newry for example?
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Spot on kid.
The very well paid academics want a permanent state of lockdown until we eradicate a disease thatâs going no where⌠Not to mind the question about the border. To achieve this a large chunk of society have to exist on a handout from government, thatâs increasing state debt, and seriously putting their financial and mental health to strain⌠things the academics wonât have to worry about as they scream about zero covid.
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It wouldnât even be like that. It would be someone who lives in Meath and works in Cavan. Buffer zone.
But we did try to manage it. We believed that you could tinker with restrictions to see what worked and what didnât and come to a sort of equilibrium to keep Covid âin checkâ. It didnât work.
You call it âsimplisticâ, I call it an acknowledgment of a fundamental truth. Once you reject the fundamental truth, youâve a problem.
Kerry, Kilkenny, Sligo etc are pretty close to Zero Covid while following the Living with Covid strategy
Iâm sorry, but this is completely blind to reality. Weâve spent years convincing the world that the northern Ireland border is the most open in the world, with so many crossings it would be utterly impossible to police. Was this wrong? No, it really wasnât.
It also would have been politically impossible. If sealing the border would have brought us an Australian style zero covid utopia, and it wouldnât, it still wouldnât have been worth the long term political damage it would have done.
I do think we should have had a much more proactive approach, but there is a difference between that and extreme measures. Luke OâNeill has distanced himself from zero covid, he sees that it doesnât work. The ISAG donât because they are one eyed absolutist lunatics. Jack Lambert is another highly qualified voice that has pointed out how we could do better, but without advocating zero covid.
Denmark has developed testing capacity to test nearly the entire country every fortnight. We could have done that, it was suggested a year ago but dismissed. We could have stepped up instead of standing down our contract tracing. We could have had requirements for negative tests for entry long before we did, we could have had testing on arrival. We could have had widespread use of antigen testing for areas of concern - health and care sectors, meat plants, schools - months and months ago. We could been working to encourage people to do as much outside as possible while it was safe to do so, rather than trying to keep everything shut in summer while cases were low. These are all things we could have done that would have made a difference.
Instead weâve had far more lockdown and more restrictions than most EU countries for the last year without substantially better results. And we are currently a laughing stock of the EU pissing all our political capital and our image as a mature and sensible country up against the wall with the introduction of a shit show of an MHQ system that will prove no benefit and all a mere two months away from vaccination levels that will have us pretty much out of this thing anyway.
In short, weâve done an incredibly shit job. The answer is not and never was to take an alternative extreme approach in response, the answer was to take a lot more responsibility and work harder to manage it better.
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This thread is a welcome distraction from the auld birds one.
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But but but ⌠Fundamental truthsâŚ
Itâs a bluffer zone.
Thatâs the issue in a nutshell
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Far less colds and flus the winter just gone. Even during the months of November and December when the schools were open and they would usually be widespread. Iâd imagine the masks helped in that respect.
Bit naive to think there would be no economic impact from letting the virus rip through.
Scientists love a laboratory environment
Well, if theyâre able to work from home, they can work from home. If theyâre not able to, they are classed as essential travel and given special permits. And no that isnât perfect, but is it better? I think so. You cut out all but absolutely necessary cross border travel. And yes that is hard on people, but what we have now is hard too, isnât it? I was in Dublin for one day last July but outside of that Iâve barely gone more than 5 or 10km from where I live since March 2020.
I donât think people would stand for the interruption to their everyday lives that a border would bring. It isnât the same as 25 years ago, we are now interconnected much more. How many building sites in Dublin have full crews coming down from the North on a daily basis?
Denmark also shut its borders when it felt it had to. Irelandâs position on the border was framed in pre-pandemic times. Of course I support an open border in a non-pandemic situation, but thereâs a pandemic. A cherished ideal worked against our ability to fight the pandemic. I donât really see how anybody can say otherwise.
But all our everyday lives have been totally disrupted, including people who live around the border.
We must be in or around the 30k post mark on this virus. And hereâs where we are
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