Have they not realised its seasonal
Because theyāve provided consistently cogent analysis.
The B1617.2 variant is above 10% in Britain now and strongly appears to be more transmissible than the B117 variant.
It looks like the vaccines will work on it, but we are potentially soon going to have a lot of unvaccinated people in a situation where wide scale transmission is enabled, plus vaccines are not foolproof.
It may not end up in a situation like January, but anybody who thinks itās something to dismiss as a cause for concern is fooling themselves.
Thereās no compelling evidence Covid is seasonal.
It will be interesting now because the likes of gerry Killeen are either going to be definitively proved horribly right or horribly wrong.
If deaths and hospital cases continue to drop and stay at low levels despite opening up its very simple. Gerry et al were wrong.
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It seems unlikely, as each passing day gives us tens of thousands more vaccinations, that deaths will increase by a large amount. That does not not mean they cannot increase by a significant if smaller amount, or that the health system cannot be put under pressure again through increased hospitalisations.
Thereās a lot of nationalism and a lot of bravado particularly in the UKās plan, and bravado is catching here. I hope their plan works. But I suspect there will be setbacks.
And this thing is not properly done for years, because itās a world problem. We are moving slowly, then we will move quickly, then we will probably move slowly again.
Was she not quoting the findings/data carried out by some reputable enough source rather than making claims herself?
I wasnāt fully paying attention (eating Haribo) but thatās what I thought.
So there might be an issue. But there might not be an issue.
And you donāt really know
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If there might be an issue but there might not be, itās best to assume there will be.
Yeah?
Is it not fairly obvious? Why did it magically almost entirely go away last summer after wreaking havoc before and going on again this winter?
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Simple. Lockdowns. It started coming back last summer after lockdowns were lifted. South Africa had a massive spike in their summer. So did Brazil. So did parts of the US. The weather in India is always much more conducive to outdoor activity than it ever is in Ireland.
We had no level 5 lockdown from the beginning of June 2020 until October 2020 if Iām not mistaken yet this period was much less damaging than the first few weeks of January of 2021 after just 2/3 weeks without a lockdown in December.
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Someone needs to tell Michael that Ireland still wants to be told what to do by Bishops
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Can you tell me the date pubs opened last summer? It wasnāt in June. We opened very gingerly last summer.
There was far more indoor human interaction in December. And far more people coming into the country. And a variant that was significantly more transmissible coming on the scene.
That doesnāt equal seasonality. It means that human behaviour around Christmas was close to its most conducive to Covid spread. Which is not seasonality.
Level 5 comes in in January, the worst winter month, and cases go down again. QED.
Had a fair few drinks with my folks and siblings last night having not really been drinking at all in 2021 so far. Just to warn people who arenāt match fit, like me, to be careful. I forgot Iād already taken out my contact lenses, got a bit drunk and then spent half an hour scraping my eyeballs while trying to remove lenses that werenāt there. A nasty experience, yellow gunk still prevalent in eyes today.
Anyway, my auld wan was in hysterics telling me about the church taking a liberal view (what?!) on the 50 person limit. I mentioned their plan to cordon off three separate sections with 50 capacity in each and they did this.
The parish priest gave a speech at the start and told people they were prohibited from mingling with other sections during or after mass.
He said he knew people had certain areas of the church they liked the best and he was sorry they may not be able to spend time there.
He cited the example of someone who might like to pray after the service beside the statue of St Mary. He said if St Mary isnāt in your zone then there would be a different statue to pray beside in your section.
He said that if you were praying beside the statue of Padre Pio he could practically guarantee that Padre Pio wouldnāt object at all to being used as a conduit. He said you could ask Padre Pio to give your best regards to St Mary and Padre Pio would pass them on.
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Padre Pio was always sound like that in fairness
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Thereās no compelling evidence on most Covid related questions, but almost all respiratory diseases are seasonal. Influenzas, and more importantly the four existing common cold coronaviruses, are all seasonal. Seasonal doesnāt just relate to time of year and weather, it relates to how a virus and itās host behave under different environmental conditions. Respiratory viruses survive and transmit better in cold dry conditions in temperate climates, people spend more time indoors in poorly ventilated spaces in winter and our immunity is at its weakest in winter.
With a novel respiratory virus with high contagiousness, if it follows the same evolution as prior viruses, you would expect it to ebb and flow but settle into a seasonal pattern.
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There was another caustic exchange today in the US Senate between Rand Paul and Dr Fauci, this time on NIH funding for research conducted in the Wuhan Institute for Virology, coincidentally located where the Covid outbreak started. In response to Paul, Dr Fauci repeated at least 5 times āwe did not fund gain of function research in Wuhanā.
Itās fascinating to observe media coverage of this. To left leaning media, this is a shameless conspiracy theory trying to discredit Dr Fauci and lay some of the blame for the pandemic at his doorstep. To right leaning media, this is part of a cover up to protect those who fucked up by funding a sloppy lab in China that has caused a pandemic.
Here are the facts (the actual facts). In 2014, the NIH gave a $3.4M grant to a US non profit called EcoHealth Alliance, and over 5 years $600K of this went to the Wuhan lab to study bat coronaviruses. Batshit was collected in caves in Yunnan about 1000 miles from Wuhan and brought back to the lab for research. There is zero doubt that gain of function experiments were ran, as the Wuhan lab published such research in 2017 and cited the NIH as their funding source. The NIH say they did not authorize gain of function work, as this was explicitly denied by the White House late in 2014 (a restriction later lifted in 2017). So the NIH funded the lab, just not to do gain of function, but they did it anyway.
So Fauci is misleading in his answer, if not outright lying. Gain of function research has been going on for decades, in the US, China and Russia, and is incredibly dangerous given the history of accidental releases from labs, so the risk far outweighs the benefit. Whether the Covid pandemic came from a natural source or the result of a leak from the WIH lab is unknown, both are possible and there is no clear evidence to point to one or the other. There are a lot of coincidences that point to the lab, like the lab is in Wuhan, they were studying bat coronaviruses, the Covid virus is 96% the same as the wild virus from the bat cave 1000 miles away, the lab director was in a race with a lab in the US to do gain of function research, the unique genomic sequence in the Covid virus that makes it so contagious isnāt found in any other coronavirus, including the oneās from the bat cave.
One other thing. The expert the WHO chose to go to Wuhan to investigate the source of Covid and concluded a lab leak as āextremely unlikelyā? The head of EcoHealth who funded the Wuhan research. Another coincidence.
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Outdoor transmission is negligible. Another blow to the lockdown leftie, wear a mask outdoors, lunatics. @glenshane
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Of all the theories about the origin of covid the lab leak is the most likely. The biggest issue is that trump made it political with his China nonsense. I imagine we will never know the full truth but its madness how people are blinded by their political ideology when looking at facts and deducing a theory for themselves. The odds of the official story being corrected are astronomical. Compared to two level 4 labs in wuhan specialised in studying bat coronaviruses and having documented safety concerns from recent years
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