Youâve listed what you think are the weaknesses in our system. Look through the list of EU countries with fewer deaths than us, what advantages did they have?
Which of Latvia, Slovakia, Greece, Croatia and so on have world class health systems and a political and public administration par excellence?
The fact is we have as good a health system or better than most of Europe, weâre rich, and we have a small population, with few areas of dense population.
I never said we done a good job. We done a job relative to the state of our country.
We are 7th in the list of deaths per 100k in Europe. We arenât an outlier.
Again, can you please tell me what advantages the likes of Latvia, Slovakia, Greece, Croatia had over us that make our job good relative to the state of our country?
I think it could be done, with some modifications to the current testing regime, but Iâm not whether a gov would want to do it or what the benefit would be.
From a logistical point of view the easiest way to do it would be pooled testing (i.e put 4-8 samples into a single test) which would dramatically increase lab capacity and reduce costs. The idea being that if the single test comes back with virus not-detected then all samples are negative while if it comes with a virus detected results you test the individual samples.
The other thing they could implement would be to use saliva instead of swab. Some good data suggesting that using saliva produces similar accuracy as nasal swabs and obviously a lot easier to do (and possibly self-administered too)
youâre picking the countries that suit your narrative.
What advantages have we over Sweden, the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium etc that we have done a better job than, if you think deaths per 100k is doing a âbetter jobâ
Let me just be clear that I think per country comparisons are absolutely pointless by the way
how could you get the population of Cork to test within a 2 week timeframe, for example?
Would you implement mobile testing to get to remote areas, would you centralise the testing centres and ship people to them?
Who would do the testing? We are currently flat to the boards at the capacity we are at
The self administered tests would be pointless if you wanted accurate results. It would have to be controlled.
Also deaths can only really be accurately judged a few months after the end of the year when we see excess death totals. Ireland has only had excess deaths in one month of 2020 so far