She’s a minister for state in government. She went on television to defend the government’s position and didnt bother to prepare.
We will be back to the old normal by October.
Limerick vs Clare will have to be played in the Azteca Stadium to cope with the crowd
The public will not endure a second lockdown
Politically, socially and economically, closing Ireland again is not an option
Michael McDowell
There was something very unreal, in political terms, about recent commentary on the subject of another general lockdown. To me it seems a political impossibility. The public endured the March lockdown with patriotism, fortitude and a clear belief that it was a one-off event designed to prevent a Covid-19 tsunami from collapsing the capacity of our health services to avoid a Bergamo-like meltdown.
The phased reopening of the economy and social activities was done on a general understanding the Irish health services had not been overwhelmed and that the HSE and other authorities had been given an opportunity to set up the health infrastructure to deal with a second wave.
We haven’t heard whether the HSE has increased the availability of intensive -care capacity and secured additional supplies of ventilators and personal protective equipment. Has it trained additional personnel in the meantime? Is the emergency facility in Citywest still on standby? Are the once-sequestered private hospitals still available on a contingency basis?
In other words, have we radically improved our hospital services so as to counter any second wave of Covid-19 or are our hospitals more or less in the same position as they were in mid-March? If not, why not?
Does the recent rise in community transmissions really represent an existential threat to the HSE’s capacity to deal with the virus? The fatality rate, the hospitalisation rate and the rate of admission of Covid-19 patients into intensive care do not, as of now, appear to be in crisis.
While it may well be the case that the Swedish approach resulted in an initially higher fatality rate than other countries, is it still the case that on a day-to-day basis Swedes are now suffering an egregiously higher community transmission rate than other comparable countries? Is there any discussion of a belated general lockdown in Sweden now?
Testing and tracing
There was a major spike in cases in Sweden in June but their newly reported cases per head of the population is much improved and is lower this week than in Ireland, as Paul Cullen has written in this newspaper. That raises the obvious question of why we should not now be able to live with the reality of Covid on roughly the same terms as the Swedes.
As Cullen has also written, there is considerable uncertainty as to the efficacy and efficiency of Ireland’s testing and tracing strategy. Problems with this are the subject of a good deal of official and media opacity. Much faster testing seems to be technically possible. But the official-speak evasion that a better system is being “rolled out” defies trans- parency and understanding.
The public will not endure another general lockdown. It is not a political option. It is not an economic option. It is not a social option.
And younger people in our population need to be brought with the suppression strategy rather than coerced by law to comply with the threat of unenforceable penalties. Imprisonment won’t work. Fines will not be paid. It is fanciful to think gardaí can enforce limits events in homes.
Economic life
Personally, I reject the idea that the economic life of the country is somehow secondary to public health policy. The two are inextricable. Neither can exist without the other for any protracted period during a pandemic. Lives depend on economic activity continuing.
Peoples’ lives and their physical and mental wellbeing cannot be divorced from their livelihoods. For example, our way of life depends economically on the location of pharmaceutical and financial services sectors in our country. We have lost tourism for the foreseeable future. If we had to rely solely on exports of other industrial goods and agricultural output to pay for our imports, we would be set back by half a century.
The pandemic cannot be dismissed as a problem of the “capitalist system” or as a good opportunity to create a utopian different society – it is an economic crisis which challenges the poor, the middle class and the wealthy alike. But people are economically vulnerable as well as being vulnerable to infection. And poor people need a performing economy at least as much and probably more than wealthy people. Poverty destroys lives.
Our collective response to Covid must protect the vulnerable. It must protect the State’s economic capacity to protect the vulnerable as well. We cannot afford to close down the economy again. And we should not engage in bogus shroud-waving.
The trick is to pursue a twin-track strategy of reopening the economy while protecting the vulnerable from the virus. That is easier said than done. It involves protecting people in nursing homes and institutions, and people in the community who are medically vulnerable, frail or elderly. It also involves getting people back into economic activity that creates resources. This is the task for our leaders now.
His loss to politics was a huge addition to
Tfk. Talks a lot of sense.
He has articulated the TFK position wonderfully there.
We were five months ahead of the curve
Strange that he should also be unclear about this. I heard Richard Boyd Barrett say similar some weeks back but a post on here seemed to show all the detail regarding capacity was already available.
I think these are what we called rhetorical questions in school
TV3 was relatively decent last night
Ill give De Gascun his due he plays a fairly straight bat, highlight tho was describing asympomatic primary school children as a large " reservor" of infection which would align with the “stealth bombers in a covid society” analogy used by Killeen in the SIndo.
no data at all available still on whether those infected last few weeks exhibited any symptoms , but hospital admission will tell its neglible , still no plan to lock down nursing homes and protect the vulnerable- thats all you need- 6 months of data shows where the deaths are, make these places inaccessible to the virus.
again - i cant see why this cannot be achieved-
lock them down and make them inaccessible except for those donning adequete HazMat type PPE, if this a a life and death situation fucking treat it as such
let the rest of us get on with it,
A key statistic is going to be how many deaths in nursing homes in 2019 v 2020.
There’s a fair chance it will work out broadly similar.
yes and that is data that will be useful when one is doing that comparsion
but - for now and i cant see they dont publish this daily, the death numbers, profiled by age and location
if there is a common factor in age and location implement immediate measures to ensure the necessary protection mechanism (s) are in place to protect that subset of the people who have been statisticlally shown to be at risk of dying
from a problem solving scenario this is a dream occurence the way the deaths are so weighted, we cant find a fix ( aka cure) but we can contain the problem , the numbers are staring at us in the face
instead paddy has turned it into a disussion
All these medical cranks are shrewd in taking a contrarian position as the likes of RTE will have to wheel them out for ‘balance’ like having a UKIP zealot on a Brexit debate or a religious fundamentalist discussing social referendums
at the onset of the crises we correctly relied on this opinion as there was no other data to disprove and the correct thing obviously was to default to medical opinion.
now 6 months on a large gamut of historical data gas been gathered that one can use to decide on direction
this task force is badly in need of outside facilitation, let the minister for health, Glynn et al run it but it needs outside facilitation from someone who isnt involed or has skin in the game , only then can rational decisions be taken
The 14 day incidence rate per 100k has really taken off in the past 3 weeks in Spain. (Column L)
Ireland’s rate is not as high but has also doubled.
again tho
how does this impact the bottom line?
yeah we get it people are contracting the thing but im assuming the risk group remains consistent so we need to be putting structrures in place to ensure they are in the closest thing we can find to an impregnable environment
or and ill take this from the post - as our incidence rate is growing those vulnerable will be at incrased risk unless they are locked away in a secure, sterile environment ( i understand this language may not be to people’s pleasing but this is life and death, the risk group is an incredibly small subset of population but has a rermarkable kill rate ( again can data be published for us) - therefore those people need to be locked away
when they are - then experimentation can be done on the level of expoure they can tolerate
this will determine the necessay PPE but im thinking the data is buried somewhere in the 6 months
this is not a game of opinions lads, its nunbers
There’s a lack of data full stop. We need to be looking back to February as well to see hospital admissions and causes of deaths that were marked down as the flu or whatever.
There’s a great hope that the virus is burning out but equally as possible in my opinion is that we just reset the clock on this due to hard lockdowns.
the lack of data ( or ignorance of) then just turns this into a discussion
this kind of thing needs a model based approach , those running the task force do not have the critcical thinking skills needed as they are too vested in it which is why outside facilitation is necessary in order to get those running this to use a logical approach to their attempts at problem containment…a
and thats where we are - this is merely and exercise in containment and those that need to be contained are the elderly ( above average life expectancy) and infirm - action it FFS guys
I’ve been surprised about the surprise over the low hospitalisations rates.
I posted it several times but the ICU rate to June was around 1.5%. We know that we (and other countries throughout the world) missed the vast majority of cases. Just going by different countries antibody tests and various estimates put out there, we are talking at least 10 real cases for every one with the asymptotics. It’s not that difficult when you run the numbers on it but there has been widespread surprise. Varadkar seems to be only waking up to it now. I’m assuming the data modellers we have are playing a bit of a game with all of this, they are very tight on info and release only interesting snippets every so often.
RTÉ continue to publish the WHO advice from March on 80% of cases being mild and 5% critical On the bottom of pieces. We know that’s woefully out of date and I can’t see any other news sources publishing it daily. I know we don’t want FACTS in the era of fake news but we also know what’s its miles from reality. The WHO are themselves probably trying to figure out a better estimate now but we shouldn’t be publishing that sort of thing in the interim.
I heard FG Joespha Madigan was in full project fear last night on the tonight show saying “There’s a grave and public threat to life with pubs” that will send a few folks scurrying back under the bed.