Coronavirus - the deadly virus that no one dies from

I know what the R rate is but it’s a meaningless statistic at this point in time. Utterly meaningless yet they are happy to throw it out there to ramp up project fear.

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It does indeed. This spike has been around for a week. In that time the level of people in hospital has remained the same. 10 in the entire country according to today’s release.

Family took a while to take out a death cert?

Seems like Dr Tony was keeping the show on the road

Things gone to the dogs since he had to step aside

We’re going nowhere really.

They can lock us down again and we’ll be back to 10 cases a day but once we reopen a bit the same thing will happen and we’ll be back to square one.

At the rate we’re going, we won’t achieve herd immunity for 20 or 30 years.

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It’s not at all. If the r rate is 1.8 and the cases are 40 a day and its sustained for 2 weeks. Week 1 is 72 a day, week 2 is 129. Its exponential mate. Small numbers get big quick

The only way to keep cases down is to return to phase 1 and close back down the shops pubs and restaurants and don’t open the schools and to keep it that way until there is a vaccine. It’s pretty simple really.

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There’s no such thing.

Except it does not work like that with small numbers.

We’ll be bouncing through the phases for a while, it’ll be extremely frustrating.

At some stage people will get fatigued of it and then it’ll just fall apart. I’d imagine there would be very little compliance if they regressed phases.

Ehm… it started off with small numbers.

It’s the half assed approach we’ve been taking since day one. Either close the whole thing down altogether for 6 weeks, airports includedNorth too obviously or stop pretending you really give a fuck. Every move the Govt has made and continues to make has all the hallmarks of a fear strategy specifically designed to instil panic in a desperate bid to cling to power

Yes. And it took upwards of two months to become a noticeable issue.

Nobody is pretending it is not an issue that there are cases. Just that the R number is bullshit at this low level of cases when you have clusters of cases. That’s why you attack it with contact tracing.

Shows you cannot eradicate it but you have to lock down clusters immediately and severely, like say meat factories. Every meat factory in the country should be closed until they show they have this under control.

Pubs are being closed based on modh coinníollach.

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I think the point is that with small numbers it’s meaning is greatly reduced. One person infecting five others means a massive R number but no pandemic for a long time. The R number was probably into the 10s in the early stages.

In isolated clusters, which constitutes the majority of the cases in Ireland, it’s not massively useful to calculate spread

It’s a more effective calculation for larger numbers. 1000 cases becoming 1500 etc.

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Not sure how feasible but might be better off going down the elimination route at this stage which would mean another strict lockdown followed by quarantining and testing at airports and ports but in theory you could get everything back to normal. Especially on an island. This current strategy will likely just lead to more clusters and spikes on a continuous basis. And the schools and 3,500 pubs aren’t even open yet.

The higher the r rate even at small numbers, the harder it is to track and isolate. The asymptomatic cases make it very hard to do that. That’s been the kicker from the start. If everyone infected presented with illness it would be much easier to manage it

I’m completely disillusioned.

Elimination via a proper 6 week lockdown is nearly worth a shot at this stage and close the airports, work with the North etc.

This current state of nothingness is some waste of time.

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Jesus. If the sample is small then there may be factors specific to individual cases that distort the meaningfulness of the number. Do you really not understand that you need a certain sample size for a sample to be statistically reliable?

The answer the “expert” should have given is that the R is clearly above one but the sample is too small to infer anything about the wider picture.

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Cannot eradicate it with border with NI and testing at airports won’t pick up every case. Quarantine would have to be an enforced one in a guarded institution which won’t happen.

We can live with clusters if they take measures to lock down people in those clusters but even now it’s all voluntary. When building site was closed the developer tried to move builders to a different site

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