I would imagine most nursing homes lose a few to flu every year.
Tony Holohan has explicity stated they have no way of keeping the virus out of care homes.
The main problem with the HSE is that itâs overrun with pen pushers from the old Health Board days when local Muldoon councillors could get the Brendas Maryâs Johnnyâs sons/daughters etc into the âlocal hospitalâ as âadministrative staffâ. I personally know many that are in these roles and are on significant salaries and frankly they wouldnât have a hope of achieving similar remuneration elsewhere. Why in these day and age of technology are multiple paper files needed for patients? Just adds to the bureaucracy. Serious root and branch reform is needed here to redirect resources to the front line. Of course will never happen as the public sector unions would revolt as per usual.
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No - her job would be to prevent it happening or escalate/inform internally otherwise. I find it hard to believe that this wasnât coming for days, if not weeks so Paul Reidâs apologies this morning ring fairly hollow
The incubation period for the flu is a lot smaller than covid 19. Anything from a couple of days to longer than a week, also people are asymptomatic with covid, so they could go in to work with good intentions, not knowing they had it and make people sick. Thereâs a shorter window for that with the flu, if youâre sick you generally know it quicker. Still a window but a lot smaller than for covid.
Add in the amount of âtempsâ needed to fill in for Breda and Mary during the year,how much does that cost?Doesnât the HSE have sky high absenteeism compared to the private sector?
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I know my first person that got it, a former colleague in London, middle 20âs. He was laid up for four weeks, fucked he said. Only getting back on his feet now and still not right.
His Aunt died from it, in her 60âs, asthma, went in on a Friday and was dead on the Tuesday
Sick days fully availed of also.
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But the HSE answer to government.
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A bookshop I know lobbed a few papers in there last week and are staying open as an essential business.
Do you remember the bullshit in May about IKEA, Woodies and the likes opening? There was an aborted opening pushed back weeks. There isnât the goodwill there to close again if you donât have to.
We were all told that the Government were just being conservative following NPHETâs advice. NPHET were checking their model to see if R was impacted by going from 2km to 5km. We were given this vision of these geniuses sitting around like a NASA control room studying the data whilst in reality they were sat around chatting about how to nudge people to drink less with âŹ9 meals.
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https://www.dublinlive.ie/news/health/cornavirus-ireland-dr-ronan-glynn-18833935
again, simply incorrect.
NPHET recommended that places that could serve food could stay open. The 9 euro meal was a fudge by businesses looking to loophole the restrictions and stay in business, which is totally understandable or a fudge by government, probably Failte Ireland
Be truthful Tim
The herd immunity crowd from Harvard/Oxford/Stanford had an interesting idea to move carers/nurses who tested positive for Covid the first time into the nursing homes that didnât get hit. Something like half of Irelandâs didnât.
Yes I know many donât believe in herd immunity (I believe 7 from 700m have been reinfected 
) and the logistics would have been tough, but we are doing crazy things everyday because of this virus.
If you want to take that literally then fine, but we know how it came about.
NPHET recommended restaurants, as their little bubble concept of them was, opened. They knew well that a great many pubs serve more than that but they didnât even want them open.
We can go through the NPHET minutes over and over but they talk in terms of BS nudging behavior including the impact of food, rather than practical science led approaches to reopenings that would have involved some monitoring by them.
That monitoring included contact tracing, where one day they decided that premises needed to retain the details for 28 days. It wasnât actually for contact tracing purposes though as they never looked back more than a few days, it was because a few of the NPHET committee watched the RTĂ âexposĂŠâ.
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Like honestly, do we remember this? They were making it up as they were going along with the slowest reopening in Europe.
Like a private organisation operates?
youâve gone down the blame NPHET for everything route Tim. They are advising government, sure, some of the advice has been draconian and hard to stomach but letâs examine possible reasons for that. Letâs take contact tracing as an example
NPHET look at the South Korea model, decide OK, that looks good. Letâs take what is feasible out of that. Put together a recommendation and sent it to the government.
The government receive the recommendation, OK it, put the necessary funding together to implement it, prepare a plan to gather resources, equipment, locations and paperwork and send it to one of the subsidiary authorities to act on.
Next NPHET meeting, weâve actioned the contact tracing plan. OK
In the background the subsidiary authority has outsourced the work to another subsidiary authority, the resources are available, waiting, but some pencil pusher is working with an archaic recruitment process that has neither the authority or the will to push through, so it goes back through the chains of command.
By the time it gets back to NPHET itâs too late.
What do they do? They say fuck. Whatâs the outcome. Draconian restrictions.
You have to understand that their recommendations will be filtered through layers of government bullshit before they reach the public domain.
So in an environment where agility and speed is better than being perfect, as outlined by the WHO, we are a slow and bureaucratic nation. I was amazed and shocked that the testing centres and staff to man them got ramped up as quickly as they did, but even that was an absolute fuck up because somewhere along the chain of command, someone forget the fact that more tests needed to be processed and we ended up with a huge backlog.
NPHET havenât been perfect on this. They canât be. They government havenât been perfect. They canât be either. But they donât need to be, they just need to be fast. And that hasnât happened. The net result is a conservative emergency response team, who are using restrictions as their only defense.
Itâs shit mate, but itâs not all NPHETâs fault
What is happening now is dangerous, in my opinion, journalists are cottoning on to public anger around restrictions and are looking to âcatch NPHETâ out and putting them front and center, they are trying to answer questions they shouldnât. The net result of which could lead to them being paralysed in future decision making processes. Not good for a team that needs to act swiftly. Talk of reform and all that is understandable. Necessary. 100%. But not during the crisis. We need to learn from this, 100% and be ready and more agile if this ever happens again, but this is our hand for the current crisis.
Iâm not saying put on the Green jersey, but portion out the blame appropriately, it isnât all on NPHET.
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Not entirely sure this is true. I think thereâs be widespread support in the public if they thought reform would approve the health service. Redundancy and retraining should be enough to sort the problematic staff, if indeed so many of them do exist as is widely believed.
Journalists should be trying to catch NPHET out and they should be putting them front and centre. A couple of hundred thousand people are out of work this morning because of recommendations that NPHET have made. You can argue the rights and wrongs of the recommendations but they damn sure should be scrutinised. Your mental gymnastics to absolve NPHET of any wrongdoing is getting weird now.
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This is quite something. Simply not believable. The government and NPHET are definitely engaging in creative accounting when it comes to schools.